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The Joy of Special Interests
A Celebration of Autistic SPINing
In retrospect, my excitement when he asked if I had any special interests as a child must have been a clue for the doctor that I was, in fact, autistic.
And at 49 years old, I really was excited to talk about my childhood special interests with him. Where to even start? Little House on the Prairie, obviously. Then Princess Diana and the entire British Royal family. All the books by Madeline L’Engle. Oddly, hookers. I was fascinated by prostitution since early childhood, and I think it might be a thing from a past life.
The point is, sometimes I feel like throughout time and space, my entire life has existed as a web of intense special interests. Currently, that web is grafted temporarily onto me, a human female who often feels she’s just lurching around, looking for people on whom to infodump about my current fixation. But I never put that together with autism.
Before I was diagnosed, I didn’t realize that “special interests” are a staple of autism. In fact, they’re such a big part of many autistic people’s lives that the term SPIN has become a portmanteau (SPecial INterests). For almost half a century, I’d thought that my own intense hyperfixations were just a weird me thing. Just something else that marked me as different, something else that kept me from…
