Special interests or passions are a beautiful and confounding part of the autistic experience.
They can materialize out of nowhere. One day you have absolutely no opinions on ships, and the next day you are suddenly overcome with the need to learn about every nautical disaster. Passions can disappear just as suddenly; in the middle of sorting through your collection or thinking through your body of knowledge, you might realize that the spark just isn’t there anymore.
Special interests can be a source of joy in a world that doesn’t always make sense, the foundation of a rewarding career or hobby, an overwhelming fixation that has a negative impact on other parts of our lives, or some baffling mix of all of the above. We don’t always get to choose when, how, or how much our interests are going to affect us.
Which means that it’s not always easy to simply turn your special interest off, if some component of it turns out to be problematic—or downright harmful.
As an autistic person who has had long-term special interests in both rock music and professional wrestling, I unfortunately have extensive experience in this field. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what I can do, what I should do, and what I want to do if troubling new information comes to light about an object of my fixation. And about how to navigate complex feelings about potentially complex situations, when my brain is wired in a way that sometimes appreciates more black-and-white thinking.
I know that a lot of my fellow autistic people are struggling with similar issues right now. Between J.K. Rowling’s continuing descent into transphobia—and actually funding causes that make trans people’s lives worse—and the revelations of Neil Gaiman’s history of abuse, there are some very special interest-friendly works of art that require some reevaluation. And there are some intensely invested autistic people who are left wondering if and how they can continue to interact with material that has been produced by harmful people.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer some of the approaches and perspectives that I have found helpful—though I don’t have all of the answers. I suspect that this is something I’ll be grappling with for as long as I live and care about things. But I have found ways to make that work a little easier and maybe they can help you, too.
1. Give yourself some grace
Some autistic people need longer to process new information, emotions, and change. Some of us also have fairly black-and-white thinking on certain matters. There’s nothing wrong with either of these things, but the combination of them can make life a little harder on us when we learn that someone involved in a special interest of ours is causing harm.
A couple of weeks ago, I was told, in confidence, some pretty heartbreaking information about a musician that I loved. Later that day, I realized that I had one of their songs stuck in my head while I was in the shower. My knee-jerk reaction was to beat myself up. How dare I be thinking of that song right now! Didn’t I care about victims at all?
But I wasn’t a monster. I was just an autistic person who had loved an artist for decades and known an ugly truth about them for a tiny fraction of that time. It’s going to take me a while to recalibrate and figure out if and how I can approach their work in the future.
This doesn’t mean that we should blithely and indefinitely ignore any information that makes us feel uncomfortable about our special interests. But I think it’s OK if we give ourselves a little extra time and space to figure this stuff out.
2. Make a little graveyard or purgatory
When a special interest turns problematic, we don’t just have to figure out what to do about our interest itself, but also what to do with the stuff we’ve acquired as a result of our interest. If you’re the kind of autistic person who gets very attached to inanimate objects, this means you’re also figuring out if you have to part with physical items that you have a deep emotional connection to, one that might go beyond what those objects initially represented to you.
If you’re the kind of person who feels freer when you purge everything, that’s great. Go forth and unburden yourself! If you’re like me and you can’t, that’s OK, too. A compromise that I’ve found helpful is to establish a little space for stuff that I cannot love the same way I used to but can’t bear to part with, either.
I haven’t listened to The Posies since allegations of sexual misconduct against frontman Ken Stringfellow came to light in 2021. But I have not been able to say goodbye to my CD copy of their 1996 album, Amazing Disgrace. That physical object and I have been through so much together over the past three decades. Even if I can’t connect to what’s on it anymore, I can’t toss it. So I made a little space for it away from other music.
3. Follow the splinter interests
Splinter interests and side quests are some of my favourite parts of having a special interest. I love when my intense fascination with one topic opens my eyes to other things I never would have considered before. I was never that much of a bug person until I got really into pro wrestling. Then I learned that my favourite wrestler breeds beetles, and I started to get more curious about those species. Now I know how to pin and frame insect specimens.
In addition to opening up new worlds and sparking new fascinations, side quests can also come in handy when something about your main interest goes wrong. If you can’t interact with the primary source of your fascination in the same way anymore, you might be able to redirect some of that passion to other parts, or to other things that interest introduced you to.
If you’re really lucky, there might actually be other artists involved in your main special interest that you can follow, outside of what they’ve done with the problematic part. I was able to shift my interest in the band The Smiths to guitarist Johnny Marr, after their singer Morrissey turned monstrous.
4. Take a meta approach
I don’t recommend this one if you’re in need of comfort from your special interest. But if you’re in a more analytical mood, it can be intriguing.
If you can’t enjoy a special interest itself in the same way, sometimes it’s valuable to take a step back and learn more about other people’s perspectives on it. It might not be as fun as being able to dive into a comfort movie with no other concerns, but it can be less jarring and upsetting than having to abandon it entirely. And these new perspectives can be fascinating and illuminating in their own ways.
When people started to pick up on affiliations between a musician I enjoyed and The Proud Boys, I started reading articles that broke down how certain themes had always been apparent in that musician’s work. While the reading wasn’t as much fun as a propulsive three minute rock song, I did learn a fair amount about myself, and how I’d approached everything from irony in music to separating the art from the artist, from that exercise.
5. See what the other communities in the fandom are up to
One of the many great things about an engaged and creative fandom is that you still have each other, and what you’ve built together, even if the initial spark turns problematic. You can also turn to each other to figure out where to go next. I might not be much of a wizard fan in general, but even I found this “J.K. Rowling sucks, what now” discussion between die hard Harry Potter fans and creatives from the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast educational and heartening.
If you can’t love the art itself in the same way anymore, you might still be able to find something in the fan fiction, critical analysis, and community it originally inspired.
- Source: Sophia’s Mission
