Humpback whales are capable of migrating the globe, from Antarctica to the PacificChristopher Michel

One of the curses of neurodiversity is that literature isn’t written for you; when I do stumble across the rare lines I can relate to I copy them down and keep them close to me like a list of precious spells. At the moment my favourite is a poem by Rupi Kaur which begins: “I don’t know what living a balanced life feels like.”  

I also live in extremes. It’s strange that Asperger’s has become synonymous with coldness when if I had to choose one word to summarise my experience of it, it would be intensity. Our heightened sensory sensitivity means our external world is literally more intense; rough fabrics burn, bad smells make us retch. But intensity also defines my inner life.

One of the most well known characteristics of the autistic spectrum is ‘Special Interests’, a term which makes me cringe every time I type it as it’s heavily imbued with the infantilising, patronising tone I resent so much. I prefer to call them what they really are, which is obsessions. As a child, mine followed fairly stereotypical patterns; dinosaurs, then trains, then marine life, then rainforests, then Pokémon, and so on. It’s common for children to go through periods of deep interest in a topic but autistic obsessions are exceptional in their intensity and sophistication. When I was six I could recognise every single native British bird from the sound of their song and when I was seven I knew the Latin names, habitat, and extinction period of most discovered dinosaurs. When I was two and a half I insisted on listening to the same story tape on every car journey; when my mum forgot it I would calmly begin “Kipper and Friends by Mick Inkpen. Read by Dawn French...” and reel off the entire tape from memory.

Special interests are one of my favourite parts of my brain; being able to extract so much genuine pleasure and comfort from your passion is a gift. It’s a pleasure that is almost physical; I will often become so filled with adrenaline by thinking about a special interest that I can’t sit still and have to pace excitedly around my room in circles. At times, however, it can tip from passionate into a compulsive and all-consuming coping mechanism. When I’m feeling low or anxious I become much more obsessive; when I was very depressed it wasn’t uncommon for me to stay up until 6am furtively researching sea animals, physically unable to focus on important deadlines or even getting up to have a shower or make food until I had read every single thing I could find about humpback whale migration patterns. In these periods, the obsessions became so intense that I, overwhelmed, would burst into tears. I once had to explain through my sobbing to a confused ex-boyfriend that I wasn’t upset, I had “just been thinking TOO MUCH about whales”.

A perfectly packed pile of logs, a book you can't put down or compulsively rewatching a film. Obsessions have their darker sideBoetter

This theme of being either entirely apathetic or all-consumingly obsessed applies to almost everything. I don’t just ‘like’ a song; I’ll listen to nothing else for weeks on end. It takes me forever to watch new series or films because I enjoy watching my favourites over and over and over again until I know them so well I can play them right through on the back of my eyelids when I’m going to sleep.

Being personally responsible for half the views on Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ may be harmless, but obsessiveness has a darker side. Our obsessions are shaped by our environment; when autistic girls grow out of trains and animals and hit puberty and all the expectations that come with womanhood, our compulsive brains are a perfect target for eating or exercise disorders. We’re pretty much hard-wired to be extremely vulnerable to addiction, too; the relationship between alcohol and Asperger’s is something I’ll touch on again in a later column.

Special interests are often treated as an isolated trait or quirk, but autistic obsessions aren’t just about trainspotting, natural history museums or being really good at maths. They’re symptomatic of the intensity of the whole autistic brain. Whatever we do, we do obsessively. We worry obsessively; tiny, barely noticeable social mistakes consume my thoughts for months and leave me battling a strong compulsion to cut off everyone who saw it and never speak to them again. We love obsessively, too, both platonically and romantically, although we sometimes lack the skills to express it. It’s another in a list of a endless dark ironies in a world which will always see me as cold.

In reality, as that Rupi Kaur poem finishes, “the good thing about feeling in extremes is/when i love i give them wings but… you should see me/when my heart is broken/i don’t grieve/i shatter”