Published on 12, July, 2020
Thank you to user JuniperFromGallifrey who informed me about the idea of monotropism, a concept developed by autistic people themselves to describe the intense focus autistic people have on their particular interests, meaning that other stimuli may be disregarded. For instance, if you're engaged in your special interest you may not notice someone speaking to you, or that you're hungry. And if someone draws you away from your activity of interest, itay be very irritating or make you angry, and it's difficult to re-focus. It's understood as a strength, the ability to concentrate so well.
I'm thinking of seeking diagnosis (female, age 40, married, two kids) it's very expensive in my country (NZ), and I'm doing a deep dive into autism to really understand it and assess whether I have enough characteristics to make it worth being assessed.
In the past I would focus deeply and for long periods of time on: reading fiction (from being a small child), academic essays at school/college/uni, painting for hours and hours into the night, playing particular adventure-based video games (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle...) for 10+ hours. I wouldn't eat when I was focused on something. But, I don't think I experienced those things as having gone down a long tunnel, and I didn't struggle with being brought out of my attention focus.... if someone came in and spoke to me I would stop and speak back, for instance. (Although my answers would be like... "what are you painting?" "A picture" [teen eye roll], what are you reading? "Ugh, a book". What's it about? "A girl".... etc etc so I guess I did find it irritating.... though I found my parents generally irritating lol.)
I guess I'm wondering, do all autistic people experience monotropism in the same way? Do women experience it differently to men? It seems to be a defining characteristic that all autistic people share as a description of themselves... or am I wrong about that? Do all autistic people struggle with refocusing your attention while enjoying your special interests?
It would make me very happy to be diagnosed with autism. My social difficulties have always been extreme. In addition, after reading this forum, I have a lot in common with a lot of people here. I have only ever had a couple of friends at a time, and a lot of the people I have chosen to spend time with have now been diagnosed with autism - I guess like attracts like, I don't perceive any oddness in my autistic friends, I appreciate their directness and the fact they only talk about interesting things. I would love to have an explanation for my difficulties. It would be a relief because I wouldn't be so hard on myself for all of my social, professional and personal failures. Thanks in advance
I don't just see it as related to special interests. It can also be about thoughts. I see it more as the way we focus our attention on something. It also seems to me to be related to inertia. That being difficulty starting, stopping or changing between states.
That's primarily my area of greatest vulnerability to it too. Some small trigger can knock business-as-usual on its axis and make me obsessively worry to a point when until I get highly elusive closure on a suddenly all-consuming question (one I need the answer to to get out of a tailspin of feeling unsettled, fearful, dysregulated). One of the worst of these was a several-month period in 2018-2019 where, after someone I know made an off-handed remark, I went and looked up some stats to see how anomalous or otherwise I might be regarding something. When I realised just how vanishingly rare I was, I felt the world tilt on its axis in an instant, and everything in my everyday life receded into the background and suffered - my job, my hobbies, my rest-time... all of it essentially gone. I wanted to get back to them, but I had to go the long way round. Digging deeper and deeper, cross-checking more and more things, finding a counsellor to talk about it intensely with, trying to ease the sense that I was a cosmic joke and instead had my valid place in things. In the end, only my diagnosis truly got me there: I no longer had to frame things as failure but as valid and inevitable difference. I was also by that point so sick and exhausted that I had to let go of it. Someone else might have done that in one afternoon. Briefly pondered, lightly googled, shrugged, moved on, watched Netflix, whatever. I sometimes envy that little bit of mental kung-fu. I can only take the slow and torturous path to where they go in a spiritual hyper-jump. Though maybe I'm getting glacially slowly closer to closing the gap there.
The other more pleasant variant of that for me is obsessively mapping out stuff that it astonishes me other people don't care about. It takes various forms, but when a circle needs squared - even if it's only to my satisfaction- I can't rest and enjoy (well, doing the calculations/deductions kind of *is* some of the fun) until it's started. Quite often that takes the form of 'can I make this tv programme contunuity fit together as a workable calendar? Case in point: I made extensive notes while watching Northern Exposure to track how many years it took place over, whether we had to jump a year ahead at some point etc. And discovered that a run of about five eps had to be moved from broadcast order to a slot between two earlier episodes to make that year's/season's chronology even possible within a 365 standard earth year which it purports by implication gto be set in. In the end I hammered something workable into shape and I have those notes to assist my re-watches so I can just fully lean to the escapism knowing the 'this all checks out' groundwork is done.
I'm doing something similar with Grange Hill at the moment. Trying to determine where they've jumped from one year to the next can be tricky (they nearly always skip Christmas)... but I simply must know! I must be one of the few people on the planet who not only cares but can't fully relax until I have it all square in my head... and sometimes on paper!
I also had a very cruel and protracted joke played on me by a covert narcisist in 2019-2020 and the obsessive spiral of trying to make sense of the madness afterwards and square a very warped circle must have given them considerable supply. It nearly ended me. They could see my monotropism, and they wound me up like a toy and having built me up to set me on a course to completely reverse that in the worst way... ot's taken a lot of work to claw my way back to (approximately) the me they took a metaphorical blowtorch to. The supply they must have got from knowing the damage (even once I was ghosted they knew the pain was still going on in darkness) would have kept them quite satiated for a while... before the next blind victim, probably themselves neurodiverse as I guess that's where the fun lies- NTs are too hardened and wise to such (to them) obvious traps. They will play the game on the same terms, knowing it is one. We authentic and hyper-empathic ASD-types, who need overt text, not the encoded cryptic subtext of 'you should be getting what's going on here ut I won't ever tell you directly', are irresistable targets for such vampires. And the monotopic hell that awaits in the aftermath is like emotional third degree burns for the longest time...
That sounds awful, there are some terrible people out there.