Special Interests

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What your new special interest?

I have multiple special interests that I seem to cycle through repeatedly through every year. I will focus on one exclusively for several weeks then shift to another for another several weeks, and on and on. When I’m on one subject I will spend hours researching, reading about, or doing whatever it happens to be during the time period.

My current special interest in the last few weeks is model trains.
My other interests are:
Model cars, especially hot rods
Languages, especially Indo-European languages.
Model planes
Gardening
World history
Cars
Cameras
Robots
Music

I was at a role-playing game store the other day where they have the room full of people playing at tables, and I’m getting the feeling that might become another special interest, but maybe not. I won’t know until I become obsessed with it.

How do your special interests manifest?

what do you mean by new?
Autism study and trying to help older adults find diagnosis has been a passion since I learned of my autism a few years ago.
I have a huge collection of house plants recent to me in the past 4 years or so, When I find a new author I like I try to get all their writings and read them in a sort of a "binge".

I am being forced to take an interest in diet due to recent diagnosis of diabetes.

I have some strong interests in things since early childhood and others I have discarded.

Some are beloved but "on hold" while I discover others.

There is always something interesting to learn about.

I have said to many people that learning is a form of recreation to me.

My latest one is vitamins and minerals. It's purely for the practical goal of getting the right amounts of them all. I never expected it to be so complicated, I thought I could probably sort it all out in a couple of days. Fat chance. I don't even know whether to call it a special interest, because I wouldn't do it if I didn't want the results, and I don't entirely like spending all these weeks analysing and studying it all. I think I've just about finished the project, apart from making the actual changes to what I consume, which will probably be quite complicated and time-consuming at first because there'll be unexpected surprises and problems to solve, but I can hardly wait for it to settle down into a simple routine. I daren't fudge it because I don't want to be deficient in anything and I certainly don't want to overdose, I just want to be reasonably sure I'm getting the recommended daily amounts of everything I should be getting.

As I say, I'm not sure if it qualifies as a proper special interest because I want to get to the point where I don't have to think about it any more. I'm often like that with my "special interests." There's often an element of liking the process for its own sake but mostly I just want the results and I get fed up with the work of getting there. My brain wiring seems to make me very detailed, perfectionist, analytical and scientific about the way I do things, but I don't really want it to. It's just that it always seems logically the best way to work. Anything more glib and neurotypical just gets me a poor result or it does more harm than good.

Does anybody else feel trapped like that by any of their special interests, or do you all completely love doing them?

I suppose with me it's a kind of mixture, even within a single interest. For example, most of the nutrition work was purely for the end results, but I did go off at a tangent for a day or two to investigate the "incomplete protein myth." I couldn't find an intellectually-satisfying debunk of it on the Web (though it's been refuted without good attention to detail many times), so I decided to figure it out for myself. I really didn't need to. I already know I'm not amino acid deficient, so it doesn't affect my nutritional interventions at all, but I just felt like going down that rabbit hole for the sheer fun of it.

What does "special" in special interest refer to?

I hear people use the words but never explain the adjective special.
What then would a non-special interest be?

To me it seems that special interests have to do with activities you do for enjoyment and pleasure. It would be nice to activities without all of the frustrations.
I know there are people who do things for fun but most of us probably get frustrated a lot.
And then we are ASD people so we do not deal with difficulties that well.

I admit I feel trapped by my special interest in plastic model kits. I have so many (literally thousands) I’ve become a hoarder, which interferes with quality of life.

My new special interest is 501d apostolic associations.

I have multiple:

Touhou Project game series

Xenoblade game series

The Owl House

Yuri manga/LGBTQ+ content in general

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

Transformers (the robots not the electrical device)

the book i'm writing

astronomy, quantum physics, many-worlds realm of science

speculative biology

AI art and AI chatbots