#special interests

brightmoonbitterfrost:

i was talking to a friend and i told her 

“i feel my special interest fading” 

my special interest has been kpop/korean culture/language and it’s been that for about 6 years. it’s been the thing i think about, interact with, love, and study every day. For six years. 

now that interest is changing, fading away, and i don’t have anything to fall back on besides The Untamed, but it doesn’t live up to Special Interest Expectations (if that makes any sense…like I used to love it a lot and i still like it but I don’t interact with it as much anymore) 

I told my friend I felt anxious and restless about losing my special interest, and she said “Do you need one?” 

And I guess I never really thought about how allistics don’t really think of special interests as anything more than…just an interest. 

Ihaveto have a special interest. If i don’t have something to interact with every day and study and gather information about and love and cherish, something that brings me unbridled joy…I feel like I’m nothing. I’m depressed, and restless, and feel like a shell of myself. 

and losing a special interest of this magnitude? it hurts. It’s not a one and done, you wake up and you’re suddenly not interested anymore, at least not for me. it takes days, sometimes weeks, of going away and back to it and finally leaving it alone and feeling terrible for it. 

anyway. 

what do you do when you’ve lost a special interest? how do you feel? do you tend to pick up a new interest quickly or does it take a while? I would like some opinions. 

This is definitely a struggle, and I’m sorry you’re facing that :( Just because it’s fading and you may switch your focus to something else doesn’t mean that it’s less important! It sounds like as a special interest this has had a pretty big impact on your life. You’re not going to suddenly forget about it, and you’ll still have those memories to look back on.

For me personally, when I lose a special interest, I never really lose it. I make sure to add it to my list of special interests that I’ve had throughout my life so that if I’m ever dealing with being special-interest-less, I can look back on that and possibly get back into it. And I have gotten back into past special interests several times.

When I just lose a special interest though, I definitely feel bereft and lost. It scares me when I feel my interest fading, because I don’t like feeling that way. So your fears are totally understandable and normal. If you’re really upset and scared about losing your current special interest, maybe find a way to “refresh” it or put a new spin on it. If there’s something to it that you haven’t explored yet, try that. For example, reading or writing fanfiction, writing or translating something in Korean, watching Korean youtubers, etc.

Also, the speed at which we get into new things is different for everyone, but I tend to get into new things pretty quickly. It’s all about being willing to try new things. This is the time for finally checking out those shows/books/youtubers/recipes that people have been recommending. Just in general trying to keep yourself busy and engaged in something usually will help.

Good luck! I know changes are hard, but you’ll get through it!

Fellow Autistic Peeps,

In this time of self isolation and quarantine, are you spending your time:

a) getting into new things and having new special interests or

b) cycling through every single special interest you’ve ever had in your entire life

lovemedonlothario:

lovemedonlothario:

we as the autistic community have GOT to start talking about how a special interest can be toxic

you might have a toxic special interest if:

• it interferes with your ability to care for your own needs, be they physical, psychological, or social
• they bring out your worst behaviors (might overlap with a toxic fandom)
• they are demonstrably harmful to minority communities/the world at large
  

i once had a therapist tell me to think of special interests like relationships. they CAN be bad for you and sometimes you have to end them.

frogpronouns:

what you need to understand about recommending a show to me is that no matter how much we both know I’ll like it, I can’t watch it until the Neurodivergence Department in my brain approves it. I don’t know when that will be, and I don’t have any more control over it than you do.

Movies, Books and comics too and I’m sorry it’s just the way my brain works

biconic-rosa-diaz:

Had a revelation recently and thought it might help other people too.

There is absolutely NO shame in having a ton of projects on the go and switching between or even dropping them on a whim.

Hobbies are meant to be FUN.

You can have 20 writing projects, or knitting, or whatever your thing is, and putting them down for a bit or abandoning them is a-okay.

I personally would never think that someone who started playing a video game and then decided to play another before it was finished was a quitter, so why am I so judgemental towards myself?

Doing your hobbies in a way that brings you joy isn’t selfish or weak, it’s…literally the whole point of them. Go nuts!

funnytwittertweets:

azcrowleyfell:

mycroftrh:

autisticchangeling:

autisticchangeling:

I’ve seen discussions sometimes about how fanfiction-based fandom culture is heavily influenced and dominated by people who are not cis men.

One thing I haven’t seen discussed as much though is how much of fandom in general is shaped by neurodivergent people.

I mean, you have autistic and ADHD people with special interests or hyperfixations collecting information and writing detailed meta, connecting very strongly with characters and fandoms. I would not be surprised if the percentage of autistics in fandom communities was significantly higher than in the general public.

And that’s not even getting into other types of neurodivergencies and how they influence fandom culture.

I sometimes see people try to divorce fandom culture from the idea of being a “geek”, and I understand that this is sometimes because of the association with the sexist geek stereotype, but I also know that there is a connection between the two concepts, and it’s probably us neurodivergent people.

I also think this is why at first I was like “my fandoms can’t be special interests, that’s just how fandom is”

Yeah, because a lot of people in fandom have special interests

I’ll go slightly further here, and say this (well. this plus ableism) is the root of a lot of current issues in fandom.

Back when I started being in fandom, a couple decades ago, I’d argue that damn near every single person in fandom was autistic or ADHD.  You’d only join fandom if you were obsessive and were chill with doing things that weren’t socially acceptable.  (Because being a fan absolutely was not socially acceptable at the time!  We went to ridiculous amounts of effort to hide that we were fans!)

And fandom culture was absolutely shaped by this.  The standard behaviors in fandom were those of happy autistics.  That’s how you were expected to act.  You remember “squeeing”?  The visual image of it is generally someone so happy and excited they can’t physically contain it so they make a high-pitched noise and flap their hands and - a squee is literally just a happy stim. And so many fans at the time did happy stims that we gave it a special fandom name!  So even if a neurotypical person happened to stumble in, they’d learn that the “social norm” in a fandom space is basically just “act autistic/ADHD” and assimilate.

But then… fandom got mainstreamed.  It became socially acceptable.  And then the neurotypicals started showing up in large numbers.  And instead of assimilating like they did before, when they were the minority, now that there were a lot of them they started going “what the heck is this! why are people here acting so weird!  this is embarrassing!”

…and then we got cringe culture within fandom.

No one says “squee” anymore not because fans don’t squee anymore - happy stims don’t just go away - but because the neurotypicals showed up and told us “squee” is a cringy word and concept.  Which they had ALWAYS told us out in public, but we used to have fandom as an insular autistic/ADHD-dominated space where we were safe and free to be ourselves.

You know how everybody talks about how cringy and embarrassing 2012 tumblr was?  Dude.  We were literally just acting like happy autistics, because that’s what we were.  It’s just that - like you always have - you think autistic/ADHD behavior is cringy and embarrassing.

This isn’t new.  “Cringe culture” isn’t new.  It’s just a new euphemism for the exact same ableism that’s always existed, with the only difference that now it’s coming from insidefandom.

All those posts saying “if these people were bullied more they wouldn’t act like this”?  They’re not just bizarrely tasteless jokes.  They’re because the people making those posts werebullies. Are bullies.  Fandom used to be where the sort of people who were victims of peer abuse went - where we went to be safe from bullies and be openly ourselves - but now the bullies are in here with us.

On the happier side, while mainstreaming has resulted in a lot of neurotypicals showing up, autistic/ADHD people are absolutely still the backbone of fandom.  We’re the ones collecting tiny bits of info and connecting the dots to write galaxy brain meta.  We’re the ones churning out new content every single day, rain or shine.  We’re the hyper-verbal ones writing 250k fics and the ones who hyper-relate with the characters and make incorrect quote posts so spot-on they sound canon. They may think we’re embarrassing - but they still need us.

SO MUCH THIS!!!

Fandom would be nothingwithout neurodivergent people. Because there’s nothing on this earth that can rival the white-hot intensity of an Autistic or ADHD person in full-blown hyperfocus or special interest mode.