Talking About Your Special Interest

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It's commonly believed that people with Asperger's can endlessly talk about their special interest for ages, without ever noticing that the person they're speaking to is getting bored, or is not interested at all.

Have you ever done this before? Or do you not usually talk about your interest to people?

I myself used to talk about my special interests a lot when I was younger. However, these days I don't talk about them much, and when I do, I constantly make sure that I'm not making the other person feel bored or anything.

However, if I were to talk to another SpongeBob fan, I'd still be talking about it to them for ages

erm , I do talk about my special interest a lot, it always changes. but I do notice that people are not interested but I can't stop myself hah. I only talk about my special interest with close friends and my parents.

I talk a lot about most given subjects if I am well-informed in it or if it is interesting to me (special interest or not).

I don't have too much of a problem with people getting bored with subjects I bring up because I have my 5-6 sentence rule (stop talking after you've said 6 sentences max to avoid taking over a conversation), and sometimes the recipient would either change the subject after that or find someway to contribute.

The formula tends to work, but there were some occasions where I was so indulged in the topic that I'd miss the conversation switch, haha.

I can talk about my special interests for a very long time and with great passion. I usually don't go on about it if others are not interested in it. I am also very protective of my special interests, I don know if others are like this too, but if I know that someone else does not like my interest I feel insecure talking to them about it. It feels like some sort of violation of something very special and dear to me and about me. I have also read that special interests in Aspie females is different than in Aspie males. I have read that females are not as deep or self absorbed if you will with them as males and females tend to have special interests that are less obscure than males. I am more like the typical female version I read about so I can control my talking about it pretty easily. I don't like to waste pearls either so I tend to talk about it to people who are interested or seem worthy of the subject.

I don't usually talk about them unless someone else brings it up. Rarely, if someone persistently pushes me to talk about them, I can go on a long monologue and forget I'm talking to a person.

I did this recently and I still feel deep embarrassment, because after the fact I usually do realize I've bored someone to tears and that I was excessive. Some poor woman I'm acquainted with is now avoiding me and I'm sure it's because she now thinks I'm a freak. I talked her ear off one day when we happened to be walking in the same direction in town for part of the way. It only started out as a polite question from her about my special interest, and I became a torrent of verbal diarrhea. I still feel bad about it because she really is now displaying avoidance of me.

I don't talk about them out loud, but I do wrote about them ad nauseum in my journal.

I do it a lot too, but I eventually notice when no one else is interested. Particularly when their responses are only "uh -huh."

Yeah, I guard my interests and when asked I limit myself to one sentence. My interests are too personal to me to throw out to anyone who asks Besides, I learned that most people are only making conversation, so they don't really care. And if I went on and on, they'd just think I'm being a show-off.

I learned all this the hard way.

It's all very well talking about "learning the hard way" not to do this, but to be fair to myself and defend my position, my recent occasions of doing it were when I was under a lot of stress generally.

So nobody here has ever had the sheer stress of their life make them not be able to muster "normal"?

When I feel calmer and stronger I "remember what I've learned."

But when I'm already over-taxed emotionally, stressed out and already beginning to meltdown from already having too much social contact, that's when my resistance is low. In all fairness to myself I talked that woman's ear off on a very bad day when I already should have been getting well away from people and trying to decompress, but I couldn't take care of myself in that way, and this happened. I was already feeling kind of inwardly hysterical (not in a comical way but in the overwhelmed way) and I was in that place where you've gone too far into lost territory -- and it came out in the form of garrulous rambling. I was already feeling stressed and that was the result.


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I don't really talk about my special interests much, at least not IRL...I do talk a lot about them here, since I know talking about them on WP is okay. I just don't talk about them much IRL since I learned pretty early on that pretty much everyone except a few people either think that my special interests are childish or they just don't care about them, so I pretty much only talk about them with my dad and my aunt, and that's it. The fear of getting sent back to some kind of "therapy" or something like that horrific ABA therapy camp I was sent to years ago is also a factor in my not talking about my special interests outside of WP and a few real-life people.

However, there's a 30-something grad student who's in my group in the lab portion of my Biology class who noticed my Where the Wild Things Are shirt with Carol on it, and said she liked it, and had enjoyed both the Spike Jonze film and the Maurice Sendak book when she was a kid. She and I sometimes talk "Wild Things" at the end of class. She seems to really be drawn to me for some reason, and has a sort of motherly presence. When I meet someone else who's into the same kinds of things I am (though maybe not to the same passionate degree) and doesn't mind talking about them, then of course I'm off to the races.

For the most part, over the years that others are not interested in my special interests. But sometimes, I still try to bring it up. Usually to just test the waters and see if they have some interest.

Also, I have less and less of a social life because I'm tired of listening to the empty chit-chat so many people engage in.
My solution has been to just stop socializing.

I used to a lot. Whenever me and my family would go out to eat, I would ask them questions about my special interest the entire time. Nowadays I can tell they really don't care much so I keep it to myself most of the time.

When my mouth opens to speak... people's eyes glaze over, and a dead zone starts spreading out with me in the center.

When I was younger, I used to talk about my special interests all the time. Once when I was around 14 - 15, I talked at my mom for 2 solid hours about an anime I was obsessed with at the time. She eventually told me that she needed a break!

But nowadays I rarely ever bring up my special interests anymore. When I am asked about them, I find that I am reluctant to talk about them. For one thing, most people wouldn't be very understanding of my current interest, because even I have to admit that it's pretty illogical (I'm obsessed with characters from video games I don't actually play. I guess it's sort of the same thing as the example Wikipedia gives about how a person with Asperger's might be obsessed with camera model numbers without having an interest in photography, but still...)

Anyway, for another thing, I find that I actually like keeping my interests to myself. It makes me feel like I'm guarding a secret treasure that no one can destroy or take away from me. Not "throwing the pearls before the swine" as the saying goes.

For yet another thing, I have about a dozen or so characters that I rotate through every other day. I find it impractical to talk about them because if I'm in the mood for one character one day and another character the next, I feel like I'm pressured to talk about the change. Maybe I could solve the problem by talking about my recurring characters and then say "I'm in a (insert character name) mood today"?

Sorry for rambling!