What was your first Special interest?

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I was obsessed with cryptids when I was younger! Its been mostly replaced with just an interest in the weird and the macabre in general since i've gotten older, but I would bring my family into the living room each week and give them cryptid hunting advice when I was in elementary school and I would just spend hours online looking into the lore around each one. I think my code name in my families crytid hunting club was Crazydog999 hahaha, and I would make my family call me that lol. I'm trying to find that level of passion and dedication for something again!! ! Thanks for an awesome question.

Fans. Classic autist thing.

The Greek mythology at six and - yes - sexology when I was just 7 although other kids this age often still tend to believe in the stories on storks bringing babies

Dogs. For the first 16 years of my life dogs took up 95% of my thoughts.

History/Historical Facts, Music/Music/Music, Foreign Languages

Thinking back, I really started getting into "trivia" books early on, maybe from age 10.

Especially: Guinness Book of World Records
The Book of Lists
Almanacs
Any other books with lists of "facts".
This continues to the present, but it has morphed into a huge interest in all things history-related. The internet began fueling this around 1995 more or less.

My huge interest in consuming music (pop, rock, etc.) really began around age 8.
This continues to this day with all the "Rolling Stone Album Guide" types of books I have and have had.

Another huge area of interest, beginning maybe age 11, concerns grammar and foreign languages.

I had two from a very young age - Drawing and the weather. This really led my parents to think I would grow up to draw (I didn't, I'm not very good at it) or be a meteorologist. From elementary school to high school that gradually shifted over to music history/wind instruments.

Diseases; it's the only one that's remained consistently. I saw a Frontline documentary about superbugs when I was a small child and that passion has been around since. For a while my dreams of becoming an infectious disease doctor were crushed.

Ballroom Dancing

Astronomy when I was 6-7 years old. A friend of my Nan and Pap had a small Newtonian Reflector and he showed me Saturn one summer evening during a visit to Cleveland, OH

I was instantly hooked! I watched Cosmos religiously, and anything else that had to do with astronomy. I had a subscription to Odyssey magazine and I got a small refractor for Christmas that year!! !

I would look at Jupiter, Saturn and the moon, but since the telescope was so small, I couldn’t see anything else! I stayed up to see meteor showers, and Lunar eclipses.

I also remember lecturing people about astronomy and my older sister making fun of me for sounding like a professor or a scientist!

Eventually that interest waned until I was an adult and moved to the mountains of North Carolina and finally saw the Milky Way! I saved up and got a nice Reflector and lenses and spent years staying up all night searching the skies!

These days I can’t stay up late, but still take time to identify constellations, planets, and observe the moon.

Best of all I was able to witness 2 SPECTACULAR solar eclipses!! ! PHENOMENAL!! !

Barbie dolls and fashion dolls in general

Drawing and art, playing pretend school and playing house, watching the Mrs. Doubtfire movie repeatedly, Nintendo, reading, and religion.

Oh man, LEGO’s were my absolute favorite for like close to a year, that’s the earliest I could remember.

Reading.

When I was a kid, I didn't want to go out much and play with other kids. More like I was at home always watching TV (yeah it was at the time when computer with internet was for rich people).

And I hated reading. Like it was always fight between me and whatever I had to read at the time.

One day, my mother get tired of it, she turned off the TV, and she gave me my first book. She said I won't receive any pocket money till that will be not finished. But that was a big mistake. Cause I was completely hooked. I have started to read so much, I didn't want to do anything else. So we say that was my first case of hyperfixation.

I am in my early thirties and I still read. I am trying to not buying too much new books, cause that would bankrupt me for sure. I don't know how many book I have read, but since I bought Kindle eight years ago, I've bought and read around 600 books so far.

First thing I remember that I was really into was what I called "space" - i.e. the planets of the solar system and all that. I used to read all the books they had at school about it. They often used to let us write essays on whatever we liked, so mine were all about space. I wasn't the only one either. But I think I was the only one who could remember whole chunks of text from the books. I used to write it into the essays. The teachers never noticed AFAIK. I don't suppose they'd read the books themselves, and we didn't have access to the books while we were writing our essays. I was about 9 years old at the time.

I enjoyed reading before that, but it wasn't really a special interest, I was just good at reading and I liked the stories. I don't think I was particularly an outcast socially. I didn't notice other kids getting into groups more than I did, so maybe they didn't. I spent quite a bit of time playing with my toys and reading, but I thought all kids did that. So I didn't feel different in those days.

All the kids in the street had "special interests," but they were called crazes. One craze was messing about on roller skates. Mostly they were just games that fell heavily into favour and then out again.