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What Do You Do With your Special Interests?

That's one of my special interests too.

That's good that I am not alone, lol. I have a weird obsession of going to the book store and buying self help books. Now that I have a credit card I go online and order a lot from amazon.

I just got this one book from Toney Attwood and it quotes Hans Aspergers as saying:

One can spot such children instantly. They are recognizable from small details, for instance, the way they enter the consulting room at their first visit, their behavior in the first few moments and the first words they utter.

I find this to be true about people with Aspergers or Autism.
 
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At this point I don't really share my interests with others, but they are a big part of my life. I never feel bored or alone, because I always have something to focus on that makes me happy.
I might start a blog at some point, but I don't see myself earning money from my interests. They have a special place in my life as something that makes me relax, and I don't want to lose that by turning them into a job.
 
Here's my channel: Simbaholic



I feel the same way about my interests. Making money from them sounds nice in itself, but having too many people involved would kind of ruin everything. I actually stopped playing piano as a young teen after playing for my own enjoyment for years because people were getting involved and my mom was going to force me to take lessons and get serious about it.


I like your channel! A friend of mine has a dad who was a journalist. He was cleaning out a friend;s closet who died and found an original Walk Disney print. He manned up and gave it to the descendents who had no clue!!!
I bet you would have love that!! :)
 
[I QUOTE="umbrellabeach, post: 350741, member: 1306"]Here's my channel: Simbaholic



I feel the same way about my interests. Making money from them sounds nice in itself, but having too many people involved would kind of ruin everything. I actually stopped playing piano as a young teen after playing for my own enjoyment for years because people were getting involved and my mom was going to force me to take lessons and get serious about it.[/QUOTE]
Do yo work with your obsessions or blog about them? Do you incorporate them into your life?

I do extensive blogging and have almost 100 followers! :) That may not be a lot but it sure makes me happy because I do my special interest many hours a day.
 
I am a champion golfer. I play golf in Special Olympics and I have won over a dozen tournaments over the years.
 
Do yo work with your obsessions or blog about them? Do you incorporate them into your life?

I do extensive blogging and have almost 100 followers! :) That may not be a lot but it sure makes me happy because I do my special interest many hours a day.
Do yo work with your obsessions or blog about them? Do you incorporate them into your life?

I do extensive blogging and have almost 100 followers! :) That may not be a lot but it sure makes me happy because I do my special interest many hours a day.

My special interest
I try to help other people who are not informed about the conditions I have knowledge in over the internet. Some day soon I hope I will be able to find employment in these subjects and put this knowledge to good use. It seems I'm also good with children so who knows where I'll end up.
I have Tourettes syndrome, struggle with depression, anxiety and OCD tendencies. Extremely difficult with social situations and have been all my life and I'm 53 now. Strongly suspect I have Asperger's but no formal diagnosis as of yet.
 
My special interest would have to be music and unfortunately serial killers. I'm intrigued by them although I get depressed if I read or watch too much about them as it's a very negative subject.
Music is my real and only interest. I can talk gor hours about gear, songs, artists, instruments, recording and have played guitar, mandolin and harmonica for the better part of 40 years. I love everything about music except modern day stuff which I think is mostly trash.
 
I have Tourettes syndrome, struggle with depression, anxiety and OCD tendencies. Extremely difficult with social situations and have been all my life and I'm 53 now. Strongly suspect I have Asperger's but no formal diagnosis as of yet.

Yeah, 80% of those with Tourette's have some other condition. Asperger's is in a minority of those with Tourette's but there is a group there.

I don't know you but there is of course always the chance that your difficulties with social situations is to do with Tourette's itself, and it's not unheard of that people with ADHD have trouble in social situations either but for different reasons to that of Asperger's.

It's a bit of a riddle to find out what's really going on.
 
It's almost a month-old thread but I haven't known about AC until June so...

Let me talk about my major special interests; one that's diminished, one that's gone and one that's still as lively as ever before.

For a long time during my childhood and preteen years I was very fascinated by the streetlights around me. I used to stop by each specific one during my childhood walks with my parents and observe it. I used to stand under them and just look up at them. I looked forward to them lighting up at dusk and I loved hearing some of them buzz. I memorized the configuration of each one - how many lights does it have, what are the shapes of the lights, what's the color of the light, does it work, is it broken, etc., and after observing them I often drew them later at home. I ended up remembering each individual street light on almost every street, and have been saying to myself in my head - this is this streetlight, that is that streetlight, etc. I used to make up imaginary cities with imaginary streetlights, and make model streetlights out of straws and paper cutouts. I used to make up configurations for the imaginary streetlights and just...draw them out, hundreds of pictures. Of both real and imaginary ones. I used to pick favorite streetlights and any changes made to them, especially if it was taken down (and a couple of them were) made me feel really upset. Right now this interest is very minimal; streetlights are something I pay close attention to whenever I'm in a car (as the passenger, of course) but there's no magical fascination like there used to be.

I used to love observing sprinklers; my childhood town had some parks and there was especially this one that contained multiple sections of lawns, and each section had its own sprinkler set. I used to walk to that park with my mother and father and just wait for the sprinklers to turn on. After multiple tries I even remembered the schedules at which certain sprinklers in certain lawn sections would turn on, and would just approach each section individually and wait for them to turn on. I loved listening to the "ratatatatatata" sound they made and the ones with the really lengthy water streams fascinated me most, while at the same time kind of freaking me out, like how am I gonna avoid getting wet by it, the stream goes everywhere. I used to remember which ones worked perfectly and which ones made weird sounds or did other weird stuff they shouldn't have been doing. I observed each and every sprinkler individually, just like I've done with streetlights - and remembered what shape each of them was; some were round, some were like stakes, so on. I used to specifically put my hands under the streams of my favorite sprinklers - yes I had favorite sprinklers! Well until recently I did not even have this interest in memory; it didn't just diminish, it completely went away. I see a sprinkler, and I think nothing of it (unless I want to wash my hands).

I used to, and still do, love observing construction sites. I especially like the ones with the big cranes, and watching those cranes get really tall is mesmerizing. During my childhood walks I used to stop and observe all the sites in the business sector of my town, and I used to make toy sites with toy cranes over at home, constructing the mock buildings out of Legos. Moreover, I used to MIMIC one site that I was able to observe from my window; it was just a plain old residential site but I couldn't wait to go to my room and just use some kind of toy piece of equipment and just mimic everything I've observed. Ironically, the big sounds from the site used to make me extremely uncomfortable (right now though, they wouldn't - not even during sleep, and not even the bangs made by dump trucks depositing soil. It's funny that this doesn't bother me, yet thunder does). The mimic site was on my parents' bed, and oftentimes they'd move during sleep and something would be knocked over only to wake everyone up. One day I noticed that my mother took the toy site down and placed it on the floor under the bed while I was at school...and I cried, cried like a baby. I still played with the mimic site though. I used to observe dump trucks being parked on the street I lived on and would actually create some "mimic trucks" out of random objects! These days I'm long grown out of setting up mimic sites in my home but I still avidly observe the real ones, I ask my mom or dad to drive me to parking lots next to the ones nearby so that I could observe them in detail.

There we go. What did I do with these interests? I followed them. I obsessed over them. I keep wondering what exactly happens in the brain that would make these interests diminish (streetlight), completely go away (sprinklers), or persist seemingly forever (construction sites).
 
My special interests are dog shows, audio engineer/DJ stuff, and fashion related things like piercings and hair dye.
My mum is a show-dog breeder so I am at shows nearly every weekend.
I have some DJ equipment and also I work with softwares like Logic and ProTools. I spend a lot of time mixing and editing music.
I have a few piercings myself and currently I have purple hair. My hair is easy to colour because it is very light blond.
 
My special interests are:

music - I produce music as a hobby, play guitar and saxophone, and sing.

All things animals - I have watched thousands upon thousands of hours of documentaries - my primary focus though are shelties, just like my dog - which I will bore people with, talking about him WAY more than is necessary.

And corporate law - which I developed through my old job, then specialized in it at my current job and now I'm scary good at - lawyers daily ask me for legal advice even though I never went to school for it.

I also have a special interest of being right... about everything... so I learn about everything I can.
 
I used to design and make websites and graphic design but I could never get it to be lucrative. Now I can't even afford to have them anymore. It hit me really hard when I lost what I considered to be my life's work. I did this from when I was 12 until I was about 29.

I went to school for it for 3 years but I didn't get into a good school because of my high school and the college I did go to ended up screwing me really bad and I had to finally quit with no degree because they refused to offer the last couple classes required for the degree. I was "in" school for 3 years without actually being able to take a class. I tried to transfer to a better school but none would take me because of my high school transcript and the credits from the bad school would not transfer despite one of their big advertising things being, "easily transferable credits."

My other special interests are all game and cartoon related so nothing useful.

I did do painting and artwork for a long time but quit because people just made fun of me too much, so now I only paint on my walls at home and draw for dying pets.
 
I often record footage from my Xbox One games for my YouTube channel, mainly matches from WWE Wrestling games although I do have other game footage on my channel.
 
Since my future carrier is a special interest of mine; my main special interest I think, I just wasn't aware if was a special interest for many years because I was brainwashed into believing it would be "too hard" for me. Despite the fact the same people claiming it would be "too hard" for me weren't me and they had never tried it for themselves so they really had no leg to stand on when saying that. But anyhow, I guess I use my special intrest/s as a carrier.
 
I am a champion golfer. I play golf in Special Olympics and I have won over a dozen tournaments over the years.
Hi, I am a golf coach and am pleased to come across your profile. I hope your back isn't playing up, you do have a good looking finish though.
Feel free to write back.

Cheers.
 
One of mine is learning languages and I do make a living out of them. Another is progressive rock music, and with that it's mainly collecting, keeping up with new releases or discovering new music.
 

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