I want my Asperger's Obsessions back, Darn it!! !!

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Up till age 20 when i hit art school, I had normal aspergers obsessions. I'm 27 now. When i was old enough to be sentient, first I loved trucks, then excavators, then dinosaurs, then Ghostbusters, the Ninja Turtles, then it got weird: Soviet space program (because their hardware looked cooler), sailing ships, warships from the civil war to the present, cars, WW2 aircraft, WW2 anything, Warhammer 40000, the Lego arms race i had with my bro in highschool. Then Art school came and I started to learn about aesthetics and design and suddenly I was working with stuff that transcended what the obsessions were about and now I was immune to the obsessions. For a long time this has been a fine state of being, especially because it means I spend less on unnecessary toys, but at the same time, it means a certain loss of passion in my life.

Two years ago, the warship obsession came back for a time and i bought a massive RC boat and a lot of cosmetic fittings for it as well as all the hardware needed to make it run and the whole thing ended up costing 1grand for which i have no regrets whatsoever. However, after a time my passion for it faded and even while it was intense it wasn't even half as intense as my old obsessions were. I still run the boat in the warm months but less often.

I have less passion for everything than I did even in freshman year when i was learning about aesthetics and design. I was a creative powerhouse and now I am still making art all the time but the enthusiasm is gone or suppressed.

I feel like something is missing.

DOes it ever happen to you guys that when you have an obsession, over time you look at it from different angles, and experience it in different ways until you've seen everything and then it doesn't thrill you anymore?

What do you do when you are between obsessions? DO you feel lost, ungrounded even? How do you cope when these obsessions that have given you context in your life just evaporate?

Between obsessions, I play games, look for new obsessions, or play poker. I also work on other projects that have fallen by the wayside in the time my obsessions took over.

Actively seeking new obsessions requires quite a bit of introspection. Usually, I wait for new obsessions to come to me, but if I get really bored, I'll go out looking for one.

I think my obsessions have run in cycles. The first year or two are pretty intense, then it settles into a phase of comfortable and familiar, then it becomes an obligatory thing until I realize that I have outgrown it. I can revisit, which is pleasant, but I can't live there anymore. I need a new one every once in a while. Yes, I feel a little lost when I'm in-between.

MrLoony and Tahitiii pretty well have it there.

Thing is, as you live and age, you change - maybe obviously, maybe subtly.
That has effects on little things and on big things.

I haven't had a true obsession in a couple of years. I haven't really learned much since. I miss learning things.

I feel exactly like that right now!!
I am 24 and got out of art school last year as well. Getting perspective really kills the obsessions, huh? D:
I don't know what to do about it...
One thing I want to do is get out in the world and do something really exciting, like backpack around a different country. That kind of thing.. new experiences every day, new things to constantly engage the mind, and having to put thought and effort into every-day tasks.. that sounds like it might equal the old passion. I just wish I had the money and a companion to do it with.

I want Benny & Joon back. Maybe I should watch the movie again and maybe they will take over Dottie and Kit and now they will be boring.


Damn it I want to watch the movie but my husband has the TV. Oh I can watch it in the bedroom. Never mind. Now to get off my ass and move to the other room.


I went through a short period of time where I didn't have an obsession and I felt empty inside, bored because I had nothing to fixate on. I realized then I needed to have an obsession. It's what keeps me going and feel complete. Then I got stuck again on something, James Bond I think it was.

... are what have made me what i am, well read and knowledgeable and (was) excited abt doing stuff, i 'get off' on my knowledge and try to share it whenever i can. At 51 and five years of 'balancing' accupuncture I too miss the old me.

I feel so empty like there's no point in living when I don't have an obsession. I am feeling like that at the moment. I used to be obsessed with rabbits but people bullied me mercilessly so that one ended. I am kind of interested in languages. Maybe that's going to be my next one.

_________________
I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

i seem to be special i usually just get more on top of my gaming obession

Do any of you find that you go through obsessions quickly? I seem to consume mine like they are food - spending money on them as i go, and then dropping them and moving on.

Sometimes i really tire of this.

Being short on funds makes it hard.
WP was my main obsession for a while, and the price was right, but it's gotten a little tired.
What I really want to do is attend political rallies, but that costs in transportation, food and shelter.
How about if we somehow get ahold of a big truck and use it to camp out near Washington -- kind of a combo Autreat/protest event. Would anyone come?

My special interests follow their own path and i am forced to go along for the ride...willingly!
I've had many over the course of my life and the uniform and common thread weaving all of them together is 'intensity."

My special interests are so intense, that for the period of my engagement in them, they define me totally. When I come up for air, into the material or real world, it is as if I have been bathing in them, all-consumed by them...like a magnificent realm that only I can reside in and permeate.
In this sense, my special interests become my "self."
THe difficulty for others is that I change so profoundly when the special interests change or alter. SO, where others have a kind of homogeneous or semi-homogeneous sense of themselves that glides through the world and interacts with others, I have these shifts. The social and cultural expectation is that people are more or less "the same" throughout the course of their lives. But for me, heterogeneity in accord with my prevailing special interest at any one time, is the unifying feature of who I am. This presents problems for others in a communal or societal or group setting over time.
Sure, everyone can have job changes in their lives, career changes, different phases. WHat I am talking about is VASTLY different to that and it is completely unacceptable on a community level! Those who know me - my family of origin - and who understand my ASD - are accepting of this. Most are not and cannot make head nor tail of it.

The most painful aspect of this for me over my nearly 50 years, has been the expectation from others that i must not and should not have these shifts in special interest and therefore in identity and sense of self. For this reason, the real world of society and group dynamics - which is founded upon the assumption that we get to "know someone" and then we "know who they are and how they are roughly, over the course of their lives" is just beyond and outside of how I am and how I function as someone with an ASD.

Society requires a degree of personality homogeneity. Some of us ASD people who shift so markedly in accord with special interests cannot deliver that! We become branded as weirdos and outsiders...and yet we hold exciting and often novel views and ways of experiencing the world.

what a shame this can be so greatly misunderstood.

at present, one special interest (the prevailing) is dying its own death in me. Another is coming to the fore. If i do not accept this process I am taken into profound depression...as if I am being boxed into NT homogeneity as the great measure of SUCCESS.

The prevailing special interest that is currently dying in me has been a career for many years. And yet, i must go with the flow of the new special interests that are bubbling up inside me. TO fight this very profound aspect of myself is akin to succumbing to the prevailing socio-cultural notion that says "MILLIE _ YOU MUST BE ONE THING! YOU MUST BE LIKE AN NT!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !) I have had a lot of pressure on me the past 6 months to maintain my special interest as a career, because that is what is deemed to be "aspie success." At 50, I am even getting to a point of querying that, because I believe my success as a human being is inseparable from my autism and an inability to fit in with the mainstream for anything other than fleeting visits!

Success for me at this stage in my life, really means being who i am and what I am. That is where I am in terms of finding some self-acceptance.


what i am describing is vastly different from that of an NT sibling who has some shifts in her life but basically remains the same throughout her life.

I've had two obsessions come back at once, at the right time. WrongPlanet and The British 60s. Before that, I was a bitter and cynical punker who didn't have any real obsessions. I knew that things would go full circle. I just didn't know when.

My special interests used to define me as Millie said so eloquently, but since art school, they haven't so much. Part of me misses that, part of me doesn't.

It could also be the meds I am on. When i was on Lithium, among other things i cannot remember, in senior year of highschool and Freshman year of college, although I was lethargic and had no short term memory to speak of, I was a creative powerhouse. I was drawing all the time but more importantly, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in my head before I drew it, which I had been able to do my whole life up to this point but now it was taken to a whole new level. However I had to go off lithium after Freshman year because of health problems. From the summer after freshman year up to the summer before this past one, I was on weaker meds and was gradually loosing my creative abilities due to a rather subtle case of depression - so subtle in fact that I didn't realize that was the issue until the very end. Then I dropped two of the weaker meds and got onto Geodon and Lamictal and i'm more creative again but along with Effexor which i also now take, i can't think clearly enough to hold ideas in my head.
I have developed an approach to my art that has allowed me to create without needing to hold hardly anything in my head:


My art can be seen here


However, I believe my ideas that i had before were in many ways deeper but above all more satisfying.

Since freshman year I have lost my special interests all together, well, up till fairly recently as I said with the start of this thread.

I miss the passion and I am extremely jealous of you guys because these obsessions are still present in your lives!