Rachel is a Jewish bisexual autistic woman (she/her) with ADHD in her twenties. She loves writing and can always be found with her nose in a book! Her plan for the future is to earn her Psy. D. in clinical psychology. This interested in psychology started as a way to help her understand people better and to figure out what it was about others I kept not getting. It is also something deeply linked with her self-advocacy. There is a gap in communication between the autistic community and providers, and she want to help bridge it and challenge others to see things from different perspectives.
View all postsDoes Being Autistic Always Mean Having a Special Interest
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I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really have special interests in the traditional way. Not in the way of having something I’ve spent my life building an internal encyclopedia of. That stereotypical font of knowledge, always ready to be drawn from when the chance to infodump arises.
I have brief periods of intense hyperfixation that can feel like that. Where I spend days or even weeks going down internet rabbit holes and learning all I can about something, my mind mulls the subject over constantly. But these never last, and even if they do come back, their resurgence won’t be any less brief in the grand scheme of my life. Even if I maintain some interest in the topic, it’s on a much more casual level than before. Of course, when I’m deep in one of those hyperfixations, from the outside it looks identical to a special interest. When I’m in the throes of a deep dive, I can infodump with the best of them. But the term “special interest” denotes a much more long-lasting passion. It may not have been one for your entire life, but once you’ve latched onto it, you’re in it for the long haul. It becomes an aspect of your personality. I have never known something that feels so permanent.
There are things I sometimes think of as special interests. My love of cats, or my obsession with collecting button pins. But while I do have some knowledge of cats, I’m not about to quote you a perfectly memorized list of cat factoids anytime soon. My knowledge is mostly random trivia collected in passing over many years. Similarly, while I certainly know more about button pins than someone with no interest in them, I’m not about to regale you with a complete history of button pin manufacturing. I feel like my interest in these things is strong, yet my knowledge is often only surface-level. So, can it really be put on the level of a special interest?
Having a special interest can seem so integral to the image of autism that saying I don’t have one feels weird. But at the same time, assigning the label to any of my interests (cats, button pins, romance novels) feels like it gives a false impression. At least if people are expecting an endless infodump of perfect encyclopedic knowledge, which I often feel like they are. So, maybe I find myself with a bit of autistic impostor syndrome. Some days I may confidently claim something as my special interest, while on others I wonder if I even really know what the term means.
Sometimes I wonder about the expectation that you have a special interest if you’re on the autism spectrum. Sure, a fixation on a specific interest is a common symptom, but it’s called a spectrum for a reason. None of us is exactly like the other. Yet when it comes to special interests, it feels almost like a requirement to have one. But sometimes I think I’m not built that way. My hyperfixations are strong, and I’ll talk your ear off about them if I get the chance, but they pass. I’m even in the midst of a hyperfixation right now, a recently renewed obsession with the game Stardew Valley leaving me struggling to focus on non-related tasks. Yet, I know eventually it will pass, and it will be a while before such a strong obsession strikes me again. By contrast, my more enduring interests simply lack the intensity that’s expected of me. But I just call them special interests anyway, wanting to use the same vocabulary everyone else in autistic circles uses.
It’s ironically a pressure I feel the most in other autistic spaces. Maybe that’s part of my own self-described struggle to get along with other autistic people. Maybe that’s why sometimes I find myself more comfortable around neurotypical peers. Autistic spaces have their own different, but sometimes equally rigid, expectations of behavior and norms. Not meeting them feels worse than not meeting neurotypical norms.
While I was writing this post, I was hoping that my thoughts would form around some greater point. That I would have a conclusion to reach at the end here. But I have nothing much to show for it other than my continued musings on whether I even have special interests or not. Right now, my answer swings towards no, but maybe that perspective will change again. It’s been helpful for me to reflect on it, either way. Getting my thoughts out is truly one of the most invaluable parts of these blog posts for me, even if I can’t always organize them in a completely satisfactory way.