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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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  • Former Member
    Former Member

    Wub – yes, this is very like me! I can 'get' people in writing better than face-to-face. I fall in love with historical/literary characters. if I read a novel, i can't just 'read it and enjoy it': I have to pick it apart and analyse it. I was very good at English Literature, but didn't do it at university because I was sick of being forced to read novels I wouldn't have touched with a bargepole, though. (I only like to do this with books I enjoy at some level, or find 'so bad they're funny'; Austen I find a snore-fest, and compulsory Austen at school was enough to put me off her and her works for life!)

    Interestingly, some authors and characters who appeal to me very strongly are ones in whom I could sense a degree of kinship: possibly Aspie themselves. Lermontov, I suspect, is a rare Asperger's fatality (in a duelling culture, difficulties with social cues and mores could be lethal), who portrayed something of his own condition in Pechorin in A Hero of our Time. Among fictional characters, Claude in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris is the epitome of the geek as tragic hero/anti-hero, and he remains one of my all-time favourites. And I have my suspicions re: Meursault in Camus' The Outsider. I wonder, indeed, how far the Superfluous Man/existentialist hero is not so much a philosophical statement personified as a description of the Aspie in the NT world, before the Autistic Spectrum was formally identified? 

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  • Former Member
    Former Member

    Wub – yes, this is very like me! I can 'get' people in writing better than face-to-face. I fall in love with historical/literary characters. if I read a novel, i can't just 'read it and enjoy it': I have to pick it apart and analyse it. I was very good at English Literature, but didn't do it at university because I was sick of being forced to read novels I wouldn't have touched with a bargepole, though. (I only like to do this with books I enjoy at some level, or find 'so bad they're funny'; Austen I find a snore-fest, and compulsory Austen at school was enough to put me off her and her works for life!)

    Interestingly, some authors and characters who appeal to me very strongly are ones in whom I could sense a degree of kinship: possibly Aspie themselves. Lermontov, I suspect, is a rare Asperger's fatality (in a duelling culture, difficulties with social cues and mores could be lethal), who portrayed something of his own condition in Pechorin in A Hero of our Time. Among fictional characters, Claude in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris is the epitome of the geek as tragic hero/anti-hero, and he remains one of my all-time favourites. And I have my suspicions re: Meursault in Camus' The Outsider. I wonder, indeed, how far the Superfluous Man/existentialist hero is not so much a philosophical statement personified as a description of the Aspie in the NT world, before the Autistic Spectrum was formally identified? 

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