Having an Intense Interest = Falling in Love
Intense Interests Make Life Worth Living (And Underlie Every Activity)
It’s Autism Acceptance Month: the perfect time to celebrate intense interests. This topic also tops my list of writing prompts for this month.
The first time I ever narrated my life, it was a chronicle of my intense interests.
My sixth grade computer lab teacher decided to teach us PowerPoint by having us give presentations on our life stories. A psychology professor recently told me that people don’t start telling such stories until adolescence or even early adulthood. Apparently, the assignment was developmentally inappropriate, even for academically gifted students. I wish I could remember what my classmates created; I think they mentioned topics like siblings, moves, and parental divorces. Certainly, I was the only one who mentioned intense interests.
At the time, I probably called them “obsessions,” because my parents did. (As in, “When I was 7, I was obsessed with dinosaurs”). If I had been diagnosed with ASD, they would instead have been called “special interests.”
For me, an intense interest means love and fascination for something. It feels the way people describe new romantic love: all consuming, energizing, and joyful — while everything else seems dull in comparison. This passion comes and goes suddenly, beyond control or understanding. However, instead of loving one person, I fall in love with a category of things (such as dinosaurs), or with stories and fictional universes (such as the Oz books).
The way I express intense interests is wider than you might expect. Of course, I want to think about, learn about, and talk about my intense interests. But I also want to create about them. As a child, I wanted to pretend about them.
After all, when your whole life is about something, everything you do will concern it in some way. Why would you draw, or watch movies, or play games, or collect toys, or pretend, about anything else?
That might surprise those few people who research intense interests from a positive perspective. If they saw six year old me drawing scenes of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, they would’ve labeled it an interest in “art,” not dinosaurs. Similarly, if they saw me pretending to be a dinosaur, or a paleontologist, they'd call it an interest in “sociodramatic play” (psychologist jargon for “acting and pretend play”).
Researchers confuse the way we express interests with the interest itself. It probably happens because they have to study children’s behavior from the outside, trying to disentangle intense interests from merely a strong liking for something.
Now you might feel differently about those “little professors” rattling off facts, because you know they’re in love. After all, don’t you want to know everything about your beloved? Not only about the big things – say, their profession and beliefs – but also how they take their coffee and what side of the bed they prefer?
Similarly, many people with new babies constantly photograph every miniscule milestone. Having arranged their lives around caring for a tiny human, what else in their life could possibly be more important to discuss?
People complain about seeing new parents’ constant baby pictures on Facebook. Meanwhile, pop culture imagines neurodivergent people as dry, boring lecturers, who would be just as happy talking to a potted plant as a person. In fact, both new parents and neurodivergent people are sharing what they love most. Unfortunately, as in these examples, we are often intolerant of others’ passions.
If people complain about utterly “normal,” constructive interests like parenting, no wonder they run to stamp out the joy of autistic children in unusual interests like trains or elevators. [1]
To me, a life without intense interests is not worth living.
Indeed, I can judge my mental health by whether I currently have any intense interests. If I lack any for long, I’m experiencing depression. I’ve often wondered which comes first, but it’s probably a chicken and egg relationship. In depression, everything feels uninteresting, exhausting, and pointless: the opposite of intense interests.
No wonder I’m drawn to people who are passionate about things. Yes, even if they love things I don’t understand or don’t like. Intense interests make people more alive.
And, as Howard Thurman puts it, “what the world needs is people who have come alive.” [2]
I hope this post gives you a new perspective on people with intense interests — and perhaps even those annoying, baby-picture-spamming Facebook friends!
Do you have intense interests? What are they like for you?
Besides learning about your intense interests, how do you engage with them?
[1] Yes, elevators. I once met brothers, 3 or 4 years old, who adored them; I don’t know why.
I've had many intense interests. My longest-lasting one has been Star Wars, which has helped me get into writing as well.
I relate to the depression thing, too. When I don't have an intense interest for a while, in comes depression. I don't know which comes first either.
And that’s the problem for the majority. They can’t fall in love with something that becomes a benign obsession, it has to takeva pathology.