the only thing that comes between me and the awful sting of a world that's so damn mean
Early this year, or maybe late last year, Daphne challenge me and Kit to do a mini zine every month of the year. I only really started in March, doing the first three months’ zines in one sitting after thinking about doing them since January. This is how I get almost anything done sometimes (most of the time?) - I get blocked by executive dysfunction while worrying about it at every moment and then one day I’m unblocked and it all comes out at once. And because there’s just too much, or I’ve been sitting on it for too long, it never comes out the way it was in my head, and I end up hating everything I do, but yeah, that’s a story for another time. My point is, I’ve been doing a zine for every month, and I only recently did my May zine, which is about some of my favourite superheroes.
I wrote Special Interest: Superheroes on the cover because I figured I might want to write about my other special interests in the future, but then I thought, first I needed to explain what a special interest was, and that got me wanting to just write about special interests.
TBH as a teen I usually use the word obsession, because (1) I didn’t know about autism OR special interests, and (2) I think it actually gets the point across to NTs better than “special interest”? I just use it more now because I guess it helps other NDs understand that I really mean it, and I’m not just exaggerating. Like, I can LOVE things, or ADORE them. I can be “really into” something, or be in a “[insert thing here] phase”. But when I say OBSESSED, I mean OBSESSED. I mean “special interest”.
A special interest, according to the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AS, is an “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus”. So… it can be an intense interest in a broad subject (example: children’s literature, postcarding, and folk tales, for me) or a very focused, narrow interest (example: Arashi, Diana Wynne Jones’ books, or the X-Men, for me).
So… a special interest can definitely be things that are sometimes classed as hobbies (especially among neurotypicals), but while a hobby is something that one does regularly for pleasure in their leisure time, a special interest is more like… something one gets extremely obsessive/engrossed in, and focuses on to an unusual degree.
Some of the special interests I’ve had, faded over the years, but most of them come and go, kind of like taking turns. Postcard collecting was just a hobby of mine as a kid, but it gradually became an obsession in my early to mid-20s. It faded again as other special interests took over my life (mainly Arashi), and came back suddenly earlier this year.
A non-comprehensive list of special interests I’ve had growing up:
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cats Obviously, I’ve always loved cats. And I still do. But when I was around 9, I was obsessed. I didn’t have access to a lot of books but our family did have a children’s encyclopedia set, and there was an adult encyclopedia set at my grandparents’. I used to copy down every information about cats I could find in them, and from books in relatives’ houses, and collect pictures of as many different cat breeds as I could, putting them together in an old exercise book.
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The Beatles Ditto all of the above. I also photocopied pages and pages of newspaper stories about the Beatles at the National Library, and whatever books on them I could find. I watched A Hard Day’s Night so many times I could recite the entire movie - in fact, one of the ways my sister and I used to entertain ourselves in long car rides to Melaka was to basically recite it to each other. (She watched it almost as many times as me because we only had one television and smart phones/tablets/etc weren’t a thing.) I collected every single album of theirs in cassette tapes (I even had an old vinyl album of theirs that used to belong to my dad) and collected stories from my mother about her fandom days (she wrote fanmail to George Harrison and received a signed photo! She snuck out to watch Help!) and I transcribed and wrote down their lyrics (sometimes incorrectly) in a special notebook because useful websites with all the lyrics also didn’t exist back then. This last one was particularly helpful to my brother when he was teaching himself to play their songs. Oh, and there are very few songs I can play by heart (on the piano) and a couple of them are Beatles songs because of course they were the reason I paid attention to my lessons at all.
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The Brontes This was a short lived one, although I always remain interested in them. This was when I was 7 or 8, and had yet to know any of their work. I came across a story about the Brontes as children in my children’s encyclopedia and I was obsessed. I went through a lot of my mother’s books trying to find out more about them.
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer Really almost all things vampire, but Buffy in particular. I ended up developing a broader interest into Joss Whedon’s work but yeah I realise they don’t age well, now. (Some, like Dollhouse, were icky from the get-go, but I actually enjoyed Dollhouse despite that?)
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“Bubblegum Pop”/riot grrrl/J-Rock Does anyone still remember that the 90s pop music used to be called that? I’m not even sure WHY I fell into this obsession but I fell HARD, buying all sorts of nonsense and collecting interviews and articles, filling up huge binders with them. I spent every bit of pocket money I had on cassettes and magazines. I learned to play BSB songs on piano. I had binders full of lyrics. Thankfully, I soon migrated to riot grrrl, where errr it’s all of the same thing all over again. And, I got into J-Rock. Like, I really got into J-Rock - I still have some of the CDs from that time, although I can’t remember much about it, because, see below.
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manga/anime I actually had what I guess some would call an otaku phase. TBH, a lot of the time when this was my special interest, I don’t remember very well or at all. Because I was severely burned out from masking all the time, and was hanging out with people who tried to suppress/limit my engagement with any and all of my special interests (being into stuff was “dorky”, I guess.) I ended up on autopilot for YEARS, and even now I barely recall anything that happened to me in those years. I know vague things, yes, but I don’t have actual memory of them. Like, I know from looking at my fanfic recs on LJ or old LJ posts that I was into certain anime (Get Backers, Gundam Wing, etc.) and music (Dir en grey, Pierrot, LUNA SEA, Miyavi) but… I now have absolutely NO recollection of those anime, and can’t recall ANY of the music I used to listen to on repeat. The few I do recall (like one particular Miyavi song), was because I listened to them again in the last couple of years.
Unfortunately, because SPs are NOT hobbies, they’re not something I can just switch on and off, so a lot of the time I end up alienating others when I show how intensely I actually feel about these interests. These days, I mask a little less, and getting into zines and riot grrrl again in my post-anime/J-Rock time had me embracing my obsessions/weirdness more. I think that’s what my zines, and LJ, and my newsletters over the years, are for - as an extra outlet for all the stuff that I had to stop myself from oversharing. It’s also why I have like a million spreadsheets and notebooks for my different obsessions. I think this is why I tend to say I don’t “enjoy” writing - I don’t see writing, or journaling, or zine-ing as special interests - they’re just different (and hopefully less annoying to others) ways to engage with those interests.
I really wanted to get more into this, on how actually celebrating my interests and allowing myself to focus on them and be as into them as I liked instead of trying to keep it all inside, quite literally keeps me alive. I think if I had more time for them, instead of having to steal an hour or so a week by not sleeping/eating on days off (food getting takes time and a LOT of mental energy), I could maybe even start to feel like a person again instead of like just random scraps/blobs/whatever struggling to stay in one piece so that I can fake existing. But, okay, that feels like too much to ask for. Anyway! I wanted to get into this more but it's nearly midnight and I have to wake up at 5am tomorrow (today) for work where I have to run an event that I have yet to prepare for. So, until next week, I hope?
Stay safe!