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Obsession with people

Hope

My obsessions have always been people focused. From memorising the food people ate, being fixated at the sight of girl's hair, dolls, and then an all consuming interest in the actress Kate Winslet and child development.

From my teen years, and even to some extent in my childhood, I have a lived a vicarious existence where I live through other people and have no self-concept of my own. I sometimes fall in love with certain individuals and want to emulate them, to dress like them, and to do the same things as them. I don't usually share these obsessions with others for fear that they will misinterpret my obsession, but I understand boundaries and would never stalk the person - although I will obsessively research them and try and find out about them.

Does anyone else have people based obsessions? The Asperger stereotype emphasises an obsession with gadgets or objects, but my obsessions have always been people based, or about human systems like the body.

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  • Hope said:

    My obsessions have always been people focused. From memorising the food people ate, being fixated at the sight of girl's hair, dolls, and then an all consuming interest in the actress Kate Winslet and child development.

    Does anyone else have people based obsessions? The Asperger stereotype emphasises an obsession with gadgets or objects, but my obsessions have always been people based, or about human systems like the body.

    Yours sounds quite similar to the way female Aspies are more likely to present--interests quite close to the peer group, only more so, and more persistent. Also, your use of mirroring is seen as typically female-Aspie (possibly because women are expected to be intuitive and be social facilitators, so they use focused attention for this).

    I myself have an uncommon set of interests for an Aspie, because my obsessions started out very abstract and verbal--stories, books, philosophies, words, ideas etc. I think because I was so focused on those things throughout my childhood (and had a couple of reasons to mistrust physical things and maths/science) I ended up with a really uncommon degree of literary understanding. For an Aspie. Close-reading of poetry, unreliable narrators, tropes... all those things that Aspies aren't supposed to get but I get because I have been soaking up reading obsessively since before I went to school. The thing that's hard for me to explain is that I get character stuff from books/fiction/TV shows/movies because it's put in there for me to get, but achieve epic levels of fail at direct understanding of human behaviour! Actually including my own--I'm good at intellectualised insight, but very bad at understanding my own moods etc. According to some 'experts' in autism, like Professor Baron-Cohen, my obsessions/skills are typically female and not-autistic, because the autistic or extreme-male brain is weak on language.

    I think what makes an Aspie isn't the particular interest but the level of focus, and the fact that the level of focus leads us to miss out on several social or intuitive forms of understanding that NTs typically possess.

Reply

  • Hope said:

    My obsessions have always been people focused. From memorising the food people ate, being fixated at the sight of girl's hair, dolls, and then an all consuming interest in the actress Kate Winslet and child development.

    Does anyone else have people based obsessions? The Asperger stereotype emphasises an obsession with gadgets or objects, but my obsessions have always been people based, or about human systems like the body.

    Yours sounds quite similar to the way female Aspies are more likely to present--interests quite close to the peer group, only more so, and more persistent. Also, your use of mirroring is seen as typically female-Aspie (possibly because women are expected to be intuitive and be social facilitators, so they use focused attention for this).

    I myself have an uncommon set of interests for an Aspie, because my obsessions started out very abstract and verbal--stories, books, philosophies, words, ideas etc. I think because I was so focused on those things throughout my childhood (and had a couple of reasons to mistrust physical things and maths/science) I ended up with a really uncommon degree of literary understanding. For an Aspie. Close-reading of poetry, unreliable narrators, tropes... all those things that Aspies aren't supposed to get but I get because I have been soaking up reading obsessively since before I went to school. The thing that's hard for me to explain is that I get character stuff from books/fiction/TV shows/movies because it's put in there for me to get, but achieve epic levels of fail at direct understanding of human behaviour! Actually including my own--I'm good at intellectualised insight, but very bad at understanding my own moods etc. According to some 'experts' in autism, like Professor Baron-Cohen, my obsessions/skills are typically female and not-autistic, because the autistic or extreme-male brain is weak on language.

    I think what makes an Aspie isn't the particular interest but the level of focus, and the fact that the level of focus leads us to miss out on several social or intuitive forms of understanding that NTs typically possess.

Children
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