Autism and special interest - do you have it?

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I have AS and a special interest + preoccupation with parts of objects.

BITS...BITS...BITS....

My whole life is the latter that danielsmyname clarifies. And until i was diagnosed i thought this is how it was for all people. IT has been a shock to learn that people think quite differently to me in this regard.


If i look at a face, I single out one feature or flaw, and then move to another and another. IF i walk down a street it is pavement and pattern and one minuscule detail or part focused on to the next. If i look over at the chest of drawers it is always one thing i focus on - like one of the handles of a drawer.
Same with a tree. I look at a tree and it is one part of a leaf my brain focuses in on.

on my bedside table there is some manuscripts and some objects and a lamp. I look at the lamp and it is not the whole lamp i look at but the little cobweb up under the lampshade. Then I look at a tiny panting on canvas my son has given me and it is the side seam of the folded canvas i naturally attune to.
THen i look at one of my elephants and it is the small rock embedded in it , not the whole elephant.

Now it makes sense why i fell in love with Pointillism when i was around 6 or 7!

There are areas where my brain is more systematised and that is in the area of my special interests. I can develop this and throw a whole lot of details together into a complex whole.

But i live very much from focusing on one detail to the next.

Which begs me to ask??
What is a vista?

My special interests are action figures/toys, economics, and history.

I have AS, and a also have a fascination for:

domes
top hats
the concept of "arch enemies"
skeletons

and a few other things I can't think of off the top of my head.

I've always had an obsession with animation. Always. Since I was tiny, actually.....

I have had other big interests growing up, (such as mental health) but animation has to be at the very top of my list. The good thing about it is that it has got me into a film and animation course and it will give me the opportunity to have a career that I like (even if it's hard, heheh).

I once read this interview from one of the animators at Aardman and they said that the best kind of people to be animators are people that prefer to be alone, can dedicate themselves to something for a long time and don't really have a social life. Isn't it great that I'm that type of person?! Yay for silver linings! Yay for idioms!

However, you don't HAVE to be on the spectrum or have social problems to do something like animation.

Parts of objects..? What do you mean by that? Like.. what, the shiny side of a CD but not the other side? XD Or a bird's wings but not.. the rest of it? XD XD;;; (Well, I do like EATING the wings more than the other parts..)
I guess I have a special interest in art. Since I do it like every day. So, yeah. But not the other thing, I don't think. o.0 I like when things have gestalt.. (but I guess I don't always prefer them..)

AS and music as special interest.
Music is still the truest language to me + I am quite obsessed with Beethoven in periods and everything is measured in Beethoven-time, like "this happens so and so many years after Beethoven did ....whatever".
Sometimes it´s a motive of his, that "haunts" me for days, and I have to search for its roots throughout his work.
There is a little obsession in that,- apart from my genuine interest in history and theory of music.

Yes, I have special interest(s) in that media be it books/movies/music are part of my AS phenomena as well as computers & internet and much more but, I'd say that sometimes I may not put as much emphasis into such areas but, it's there though..