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During 2020, something unthinkable happened. I was exposed to it once, via a friend, and all of a sudden it took over my life. I couldn’t escape its clutches for what felt like months, but in actual fact I haven’t managed to shake it off even now.

I’m talking, of course, about my rather bizarre obsession with the band, the Bee Gees. Yep, the guys from the 70s with the high-pitched voices and the medallions.

For the uninitiated, us autistic folks tend to have one or maybe a number of interests that we are really into. We like our special interests, not in a pedestrian sort of way, but more in a burning, all-encompassing, can’t-think-of-anything-else-and-I-must-read-more-information-about-it-to-emotionally-regulate sort of way. When I have a special interest on the go, igniting my soul, my brain feels like there isn’t much room for anything else. “Oh yeah, it’s 4pm, maybe I should eat,” I say, after a day well-spent on Wikipedia.

I’ve always had interests that others have found somewhat peculiar. As a child, when I was forced to cosplay as a little girl, I found my comfort in football (or soccer, for anyone outside of the UK). My favourite Spice Girl was Mel C purely because she was also a proud full kit wanker like me.

As we know, society recoils at the thought of anything or anyone stepping out of the role we have assigned to it. The adults in my life referred to me as a ‘tomboy’, that cutesy word we give to children to mask any dark undertones we pray won’t appear in the light when they grow up. Please just be normal, for heaven’s sake.

When I was a kid, there was little I did not know about Liverpool Football Club, to the point where I took to carrying around a pocketbook of quotes of 1960s-era manager Bill Shankly, a foreboding Scotsman who was known for his witticisms as much as his coaching talent. Imagine if you will, an 8 year old wearing plaits and a pinafore dress, quoting the musings of an elderly gentleman whose heyday was about 30 years before she was born. This child who regularly interrupted conversations with girls at her school, who were discussing the merits of wearing blush, by compulsively sharing nuggets of soccer-playing wisdom such as:

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

Why oh why was I only diagnosed when I was 29?!

I went a step further when I was in junior school. I had a relative who played a Playstation 2 game called ‘Smackdown: Just Bring It!'‘. It had a photo of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson on the front beckoning you to… bring it, I guess. This game, and the gaudy, brash, and extremely queer-coded world of WWE wrestling flicked a switch in my brain and suddenly it was all I could think about, all I could converse about, all I ever wanted to do. Gone were my dreams of being an author, I now wanted to be the wrestler Lita and join the Hardy Boyz in their quest to be the coolest WWE (or ‘F’ as it was at the time) superstars.

I harped on about wrestling so much that one day at school, when we were writing about a topic of our choice, (and I inexplicably for once decided to NOT write about wrestling and instead write about something else) I asked my teacher if she could spell a word from me. She immediately snapped back “If you are asking me to spell the name of a wrestler, I DO NOT KNOW!”

I can’t confirm that she was that mad at me, or if this is just how my memory has been skewed by the passage of time, but I remember her being quite pissed off and almost exhausted by my incessant, unrelenting weirdness. That said, I was literally about 10 years old at this point, and she a full grown adult. Perhaps she simply needed to get a grip.

It’s sad for me to think that everyone’s reactions to me being a fan of wrestling as a child made me internalise that it was a ‘bad thing’, so I stopped watching WWE and playing its video games. I buried it deep in the shame bank, never to be re-examined.

These special interests had a few things in common. Society said they were inappropriate for a little girl, for starters. They also lasted around two years each and no longer. In the two years my passion for them burned bright, and they completely took over me in lieu of any actual personality I may have developed in their place. I was the ‘football girl’, then the ‘wrestling girl’.

I had many special interests in my teenagehood (including, and I shit you not, the music of Barry Manilow. More on that in a future post).

Fast forward to the start of 2020 and I am without a special interest. Being without a special interest is a weird feeling. It’s akin to the stage of grief you experience a few years after a death. It’s the numbness; the empty, odd feeling that something isn’t right anymore.

Special interests fill a void. I don’t know what the void is, or where it comes from, other than that it exists and I must fill it with a lot of information about one topic. The topic can be anything, but you can’t force a special interest. For so long I have willed my brain to get interested in the band Talking Heads, but to no avail. My brain is like a magnet, and what attracts it follows a pattern. It is usually something camp, nostalgic, a bit naff and before my time.

So it is no surprise really that I would see a clip of the Bee Gees performing ‘You Win Again’ at a concert protesting the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, with Barry Gibb dressed like somebody’s try-hard dad, with Robin Gibb looking like he’d left the hairdressers halfway through his appointment, with Maurice Gibb visibly dissociating, and think ‘Ah yes, I’m home.’

Of course, being a fan of the Bee Gees in 2024 is not trendy, in the same way as being a fan of wrestling as a little girl is not the done thing. Some would say it’s weird, it’s cringe, it’s bizarre. But it was me. It is me.

I am the sum total of my life of special interests. They reflect how I am, who I am and I am proud of them.

Earlier this year, the WWE toured the UK. I went to see it. It was absolutely glorious. It felt like giving the middle finger to everyone who made me feel like an alien as a child.

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Photo of the Bee Gees found on Wikimedia Commons