Autistic Special Interests

Think “autistic” and you may well think of a train-spotter or some other form of nerd or geek. A person who’s obsessively interested in something that appears dull or pointless to you. There’s some truth in that image because one of the lesser known great joys of being autistic is our Special Interests (capitalisation to indicate importance). If you’ve seen an autistic person deep in a catalogue of cars, or rearranging a collection of coins or lining up plastic dinosaurs, you may have seen someone who in that moment is truly happy and freed for that time from the stressful frightening world in which they normally live.

What is a Special Interest?

It’s common for autistic people to get obsessively interested in one or more subjects. That subject could be socially acceptable (I’m obsessively interested in Shakespeare’s plays) or something that opens the autistic person up to gentle teasing (train spotting would come in here) or something that the world can see no point in at all (perhaps obsessively colouring in the centres of letters in all the books you own, or similar). Some people stick with one or a couple of special interests all their lives, while others of us (like me, tbh) skip between them, as well as having some ongoing forever-interests.

Having an autistic special interest is a little like falling in love – you may want to spend the whole of your life with one interest, or you may be fickle and swap around, but however many you have on the go at once, each is a source of all-consuming joy to the exclusion of all else. That can be where the obsession comes in. If an autistic person has suddenly conceived a need to know all there is to know about steam engines, then time spent finding out about steam engines will fly by and the person may just spend all their day in love with steam engines. Leaving the steam engine knowledge will be painful and frustrating – you wouldn’t want to be separated from your sweetheart would you? The autistic person might spend too much on books about steam engines, or fail to concentrate at work because they were thinking about steam engines or have a row with their family who can’t see the value of steam engines. You can see how this can be a bit like a relationship.

What to do about it?

Many parents, carers and friends of autistic people feel that the best thing they can do about a special interest is to try to separate the autistic person from it. This is the “Rapunzel” approach – lock the autistic person away in a tower and hope the special interest is kept away from them until they forget about it. Or insist that they only have anything to do with the special interest “in moderation”. Taking away the special interest can even be used as a punishment. That approach would sound sensible if you were talking about a neurotypical hobby – setting limits on screen time for children for example – but it doesn’t work if you’re talking about an all-consuming passion. Outside fairy stories keeping someone away from the person or thing they love most in all the world is authoritarian and cruel.

Valuing Special Interests

Being autistically logical about it, having an all consuming passion that gives you joy and makes you forget about the horrors of the world sounds like rather a good thing. Specially if – as with special interests – it’s not a spotty teenage boyfriend who smokes in the house and is rude to your mother. Autistic people like to talk about their special interests – probably far too much from a neurotypical perspective – but it would be really nice if neurotypical people could occasionally show some enthusiasm for a special interest rather than get rid of it. The equivalent of your mother providing an ashtray and asking the lad what A Levels he’s doing, if you will.

Autism provides a lot of problems and challenges, but it also provides joy, and the fact that the source of that joy is completely incomprehensible to you doesn’t make it less valid. Let’s make a place in the world for autistic special interests, even if they are weird, geeky or frankly a little odd. Now – where are my seventeen different editions of King Lear…?