Could I use Special Interests to my advantage?

Talking in depth about my special interests is easy. I could do it for hours, and sometimes as a proper two way conversation with someone who is interested too. Yet making small talk with other people is excruciatingly awkward for me most of the time.

I’ve had a crazy thought about this, and it stems from something my wife has said to me. She’s seen my indulgence of special interests from long before either of us knew about my Asperger’s and has observed that I can quickly learn things in areas where I had no previous knowledge.

Based on this, could I make small talk and other social interactions a special interest, and thus sort them out?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and have decided that it’s not quite that simple. Here’s why:

My special interests are all very specific things, and whilst they have covered a multitude of different areas over the years, they usually have one of a few threads in common. They mostly involve something technical that has a well mapped out sphere of knowledge readily available, either in book or Internet form. Local history often pops it’s head in too. Thus over the years I’ve looked in depth at things like the Space Shuttle, the London Underground, maps, underground passageways and bunkers, mobile phones, Apple Macs, Linux, coal mining in the area I live in, historical photographs, the history of London Docklands. This is only a small fraction of the list, but I hope you can see that there is something of a common theme that runs throughout.

I feel like I don’t choose my special interests, more like they choose me. One often flows from another, and they have some link not just to whatever my previous focus was, but also to either my current environment, or a current technology.

My current special interest is Asperger’s itself. This in turn flowed out of learning about anxiety. If you thought that these two special interests didn’t follow the usual pattern, then you’d be right. The trigger for these has been to do with how something affects me personally, rather than anything external.

My special interests are all about the consumption of information, and from time to time the regurgitation of that information. Sometimes that is done appropriately with someone else who is interested, but often it is done in the more typical Asperger’s style of talking at someone else who isn’t really interested. As I’ve written elsewhere, this isn’t really something that I have much control over – a connection is made from a talking point to some piece of information I’ve got stored away that may only be tenuously linked, and I then feel compulsion to talk about it.

So – lets say for the sake of argument that I could persuade myself to get immersed in learning about social interaction.

If I did this I would end up with a lot of facts. I could talk about these facts  until the cows came home. Could I learn from the information I’ve read? Yes, to a degree. When I looked in depth at anxiety, I learned a few things that could help me reduce my anxiety levels, and I use them regularly. To be honest, however I learned far more about how anxiety affects people, how to treat it in general, and how it often goes hand in hand with other conditions, than I did about anything else. Facts like that are background information and less useful to me.

What I’d need to learn were techniques that I could use to interact – information that has an application rather than just being fact. I’d then need to apply it rather than just regurgitate it.

If I could do this about social interaction then I might just make some headway.

There is a catch though.

I have, in a sense, being doing just this all my life. When you don’t understand the subtle social interactions of your peers as a growing child, you find ways to make yourself fit in. As I wrote in some depth here, I observed others and stored away how they interacted in the hope that I’d be able to use what I’d seen as templates for similar situations as they arose for me. I already have a databank in my head of probably many thousands of reactions to things people say to me, that I hope are roughly suitable.

Making social interaction a special interest might gain me a few more.

I probably have the ideal opportunity now to find out. Investigating anxiety lead to investigating Asperger’s and that in turn could flow into investigating social interaction. I say could, because frankly, it hasn’t grabbed me yet in the way that my special interests usually do. I doubt the investigation of Asperger’s has run it’s course yet, and it’s unusual for me to have more than one special interest at a time.

I will keep you informed of how this develops.

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