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I'm getting increasingly fed up and very frustrated with this! I've suffered a lot over the past month with very short special interests and its very difficult- is there any advice anyone could give about it this!- and I've had one, Arnold one for about a month and see I still really care about it in my head and ill be thinking about all the stuff I could add to the story I'm writing or this drawing I started four days ago and haven't touched since. I feel very lethargic towards my interest. I'm freaking out, this might be signalling the end of another interest, I went off watching the films a week or two ago and I think perhaps I am slowly losing my interest once more but how much my mind still cares is confusing me. I'd have thought my thoughts towards the interest would also have gone if I was losing it? I've never eeally had interests before which have ended other than by going into another one.
I doubt it but I wondered if maybe I am so lethargic towards it be ause I'm about to start exams and am very worried about them and also I'm going through a really bad time with my depression and stuff. So could it be that I just need to tell myself to do somthing related even if I don't actually want to do anything at all. It's really hard and I just feel really awful.

Very typical AS symptom actually. It is a very frequent issue post on WP regularly. This happens to me off and on, and has for many years. IMHO, it's not necessarily anything to panic about. Interests can come and go. I think sometimes, because having a special interest is supposed to be one of the hallmarks of AS, we may think we're supposed to have one special interest, and that is our interest all of the time. The reality is that quite a lot of us change special interests over time. Many of us, in fact, have one for short periods of time, then tire of them quickly.

I know for me this is caused by being on the spectrum but also having ADD. ADD can, I think, present conflicts with ASD, especially when it comes to special interests. ADD can cause us to lose interest or become distracted from an interest, to the point of becoming involved with one, losing interest and/or becoming distracted from it, and picking up another.

The result can be very frustrating. It can cause patterns of many different projects started but never finished, and piles of evidence of the same all over the place. When I was still living with my parents (a long time ago), this was one of my mothers major complaints, that I started all kinds of interests and projects, but never finished any of them.

I have no idea, obviously, if you are on the ADHD spectrum as well as autistic, but being on both is very common, so I have a sneaking suspicion you might have some ADHD tendencies too, and my actually have both AS and ADHD.

The only advice I have to offer isn't an easy pill to swallow, but it's the only thing I've ever found to work for me.

What I do when this happens, is to drive myself forward and finish a project even if I've lost interest in it. That can be difficult if the project is large and requires a long complex process to complete. This is another conflict that AS can present if you have ADHD too. Aspies can tend to get themselves involved in extremely complex projects. In fact, we are often accused of making things more complicated than they need to be, and that is often true.

If you're on both the AS and the ADHD spectrums, it can help to do whatever you can to simplify complex projects, and do whatever it takes to produce something, rather than quit and move on to something else due to boredom. If you're becoming frustrated by this tendency to become bored or lose motivation, just getting something completed, even it it's not perfect, and THEN moving on, that can eventually start building a healthy sense of accomplishment. Once you start feeling accomplished, these feelings of frustration are less likely to occur.

Simplifying projects is very good for ADHD tendencies, but at the same time is very, very difficult for aspies who tend to be perfectionists. I know I had a lot of trouble producing something, and calling it "finished" if I felt the project was flawed. What I found over the years though, is that if I forced myself to make things much simpler, and forced myself to CALL it finished, and then (very important step) MOVE ON to the next project, weeks, months or even years later I would take another look at what I'd done, and be surprised that it actually turned out pretty well. In fact, I often could not find the flaws I knew were there while i was working on them anymore.

Even if you do not have ADHD, I think this approach might work for you. It won't be easy at first, but I think you'll find if you get tough on yourself, and very determined to just plain FINISH something, and do that regularly, over time you'll begin to see what you are really capable of.

I started writing songs in the late 1980's. I was never satisfied with the "final" recordings, so they were never really finished as far as I was concerned. Over time, I found that using this approach worked pretty well for me. I discovered it by accident. I actually gave up for a long time because I was so frustrated with how crappy the songs sounded. Then, one day, I picked up a tape from about a year before that, listened to it, and realized "Hey! These aren't bad at all!" Over time, I started working on them again, re-recorded many of them even better than before, still kept finding fault with them, but would just put them down for a while and come back to them later. Eventually, I called each of them finished and moved on to writing new songs. Now I can go back and listen to them all, and a lot of them sound very good to me, some of them sound mediocre and some just sound terrible.

But that's the nature of art and any other endeavor you'll undertake. Not everything you do will wow the world or yourself. And, maybe nothing will.

At least you'll be accomplishing something, and if you love it, that's all that really matters.

You know? Come to think of it, I think the core of this problem is actually the same for both ADD'ers and ASD's, and that's the aspect of immediate gratification versus delayed gratification. I think it's really hard for people on both or either spectrums to learn delayed gratification. If we aren't getting results as quickly as we'd like, we tend to become frustrated and lose interest too.

Kind of "Chicken/Egg" conundrum. Which comes first? The frustration or the loss of interest? The fact is, the one can cause the other in either order. It's a viscous cycle that can drive us psycho. Only way to break it I know of is to put your foot down, decide to get something done, and just DO IT. But it works best if the motivation comes from yourself, not from somebody else harping on you.

I do have ADD but I never noticed this before, not really. Maybe I've done it all the time- I do remember giving up on a story I wrote two interests ago and I just have up but normally my interests seem to last as long as the project in hand does. This time I've been caught drastically short or so it seems. I will try to follow your advice however and keep myself going because I do need to do it for me, to prove I can and I know I'd actually feel really bad if I didn't final my project in hand!

I hate this. It's happening now. I am so agitated and messy during these phases.
(ADHD/aspie kid here)

...No offense intended here...

You're sixteen. That may be the only reason you've never had this happen before. It happened to me a lot starting much younger, but this can hit later too. This may just be the first time for you. Or, it may just be a slump.

I wouldn't be surprised though, if this is just the first time, and that you will have more of these episodes over the next several decades. For some of us it happens all the time. For others, it's not as frequent. I think there usually is a pattern to it though. Periodic "burn outs" perhaps. You may have just reached your first one. It could be, as it is with me, a pattern. You may find that every couple of years you'll go through this kind of thing, or every six months or so. Only time will tell if there's a pattern to it.

Just try not to panic over it. It may be hard, but this may be YOUR normal.

It's scary the amount of relief I feel just from hearing all this. I was diagnosed ADD when I was a lot younger but I never actually knew anything about it. I've never known what parts of me are just me and what parts are different conditions or whatever that I've got. I suddenly feel so much calmer about the whole situation. I doubt said calm feeling will last long but it's so good to feel there's a reason for it. Oh wow, I have a lot to learn!
But how do you cope with these areas these patches when interest jump around and fluctuate and all sorts? Yes you mentioning should try and finish my projects somehow and I am a bit of a perfectionist so I will probably do it properly but don't you get gaps where you don't really want to do anything in particular, or is that just due to the rest of me.

If you have ADD, it is you. If you have an ASD, that is also you. It is all just you. It's all part of who you are. They are your traits. Learn to work with them not against them. If you think that way you'll be a lot happier. It's like the difference between climbing over or going around walls, and bashing your head against them. Doing the first two is a lot less frustrating than this.