No special interests?

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since one of my special interests is fiction and my entire family is made up of heavy readers, i never knew there was anything odd about how much i read and how much i feel the need to read.

my interest in japan is more obviously a "special interest." but it definitely never occurred to me (prior to being told during dx) that
i'm obsessed with information. but thinking about it now, other people probably don't feel compelled to look up information constantly to the point where they can't do anything else until they've obtained the desired information.

so i guess these special interests we're all supposed to have may not be as obvious as one might expect or maybe they're not that obvious to the person enjoying them. my sisters were easily able to pinpoint my interests when asked, so maybe someone on the outside is better able to seem them clearly for what they are.

i have special interests but they are always changing. i attribute that to my ADHD but i'm not entirely sure if that's correct.

I am a diagnosed Aspie and I do not have a special interest. I have had them and they come and go. I have gone years without a special interest in the past. I mainly meet the second criteria due to my many motor tics. Hands, arms, face, fingers, etc.. The special interest may come and go but the tics have been around daily for the past 30 years. (I generally stand when I use my computer becuase I find I need to pace the basement and flap my right hand in between posts.)

Here's how a psych explained the DSM to me:
Part A is the aspergers.
Part B is a indicator of how you deal with your aspergers. You realize your different and don't really understand the world around you, so you develop one of these coping mechanisms. Part B1 Special interest- you immerse yourself in something you understand to remove yourself from the confusing world around you , or part B2. You develop a strict standard routine to try to control the world around you to make it more controllable and therefore less confusing. or part B3. You just kind of take the punches as they come which ends up revealing itself as anxiety in the form of motor tics. (motor tics are not exclusive to AS, they also can be part of a anxiety disorder. So the psych needs to determine why one has tics) I forget what he said about part B4?

But strictly speaking you don't need a special interest. Thats one of the 4 items under B in the DSM.

I don't think I really agree with the bolded bits. My son is AS, and I saw signs of him having special interests long before there was any sign of him being confused by the world.

I don't know if I'm AS or not; I believe I'm kind of on the edge, sometimes more AS than not. I have certain topics that I think about a whole lot, and sometimes certain hobbies that become pretty "special interest" intense. But I do them and think of them because it is interesting and feels good. I've never had the sense of trying to remove myself from anything, when indulging in my special interests. I suppose someone could psycho-analyze me and come to that conclusion. Perhaps when I was 10, and I preferred to sit in my room and make my lined-up stuffed animals sing along to "Paperback Writer" over and over, that was a sign of some kind of confusion or anxiety. But mostly I think I just enjoyed singing the song in different voices.

I'd like to know more about where the idea came from that it's to do with confusion in the outer world. Though I don't say it's wrong. I wonder what signs there might have been that a child was finding the outer world confusing? I also wonder whether "confusing" is the only word that could be used.......perhaps the brain merely identifies the inner world as being particularly clear - perhaps its potential beckons a little more strongly than that of the outer world?

Sometimes I've suspected that certain episodes of strong attention to special interests were a result of a need to get my mind away from the outer world, when it's caused me great pain.

Hmm.....I vaguely recall hearing that a special interest that has a detrimental effect on one's life could be an element of an AS diagnosis. In my own case I find that one hard to gauge. I don't recall any time when a special interest messed things up for me directly and profoundly, but there have been a few bad effects.....the sheer longing to work on them while at school and in the workplace, a longing that I've always had to hide for fear of being labelled as having the wrong attitude. I've sometimes ignored partners because of other special interests, which has probably done some damage to relationships.....and when I resist the temptation to go that way, I've sometimes felt quite tense.

I must have put years of my life into detailed aspects of special interests that haven't really got me very far - in some ways it could well be argued that I've wasted quite a lot of my life, though naturally that has to be balanced against the cathartic effects of my activities. I guess I was lucky that it was music I got most heavily into......I never met anybody yet who said that music was nerdy. And I love restoration work on sound or pictures, the results of which people tend to like. Somewhere along the line I've picked up a tendency to ask "Is this of any use? Where will it get me?" and I guess that's protected me from the worst problems.