• Welcome to Autism Forums, a friendly forum to discuss Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, High Functioning Autism and related conditions.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Private Member only forums for more serious discussions that you may wish to not have guests or search engines access to.
    • Your very own blog. Write about anything you like on your own individual blog.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon! Please also check us out @ https://www.twitter.com/aspiescentral

Losing A Lifelong Special Interest

Deep_Blue_Girl

Active Member
Hi. I created this thread to ask if anyone has ever lost what they had considered to be their lifelong special interest.

I was a 3D animator at one point, between the ages of 13 and 18 (I am 25 now.) The process of animating soothed me and brought me immense joy. I considered 3D animation to be my destined career.

At age 18, I moved to a big, horribly loud city with people I barely knew, and had to share a room with a boy which felt incredibly wrong, so already there's a massive change in routine which I did not handle well. Meltdowns were frequent.

At the same time, I had attempted to take a course in Animation Mentor. I passed the first course but didn't bother taking the second one because I felt none of the joy I once did. It didn't soothe me, not even if I did it has a hobby. It just felt like work.

From this point, I felt lost. I suddenly no longer had an outlet, during a time in my life when I needed one the most.

[End-of-post]
 
I'm pretty close to permanently ending my hobby of plastic modelling. Something I've done since 1963.

Just getting too old with too much eye strain. :oops:

Though I'm still doing digital photo restoration and editing. Not easy on the eyes either.
 
Last edited:
At age 62 most things I always enjoyed doing I can no longer do due to physical reasons. It's very frustrating. I think I mentioned one in the latest driving post - always loved driving with a passion, but can't drive like I used to - limited to an hour or less driving time, when I used to could drive for days and want to drive more. (It was the going, being on my own, escape from everything else, being myself.) I used to have a jigsaw puzzle out all the time and now when I try to work one, five minutes in I feel a bad headache coming from neck tension. I do jigsaw puzzles on the computer, which I enjoy, but not quite the same. Crafting of any kind does the same thing because you have to look down to do them.
 
yes I already had an interest in fractals, you can focus on a subject that you like (Pokemon,Math,Public Transport,Music,Computers,etc)
 
Honestly? This doesnt sound like true loss of interest.

It sounds like burnout.

Previously, you were doing this when you wanted, in the way you wanted. You could create what you want and there were no restrictions or forced elements. In a setting you were comfortable in.

Take it into a classroom situation (a course of any type) and.... yikes. I've been to college. Even high-end colleges are.... bad at teaching stuff, to be blunt. What takes you 3 bloody years to learn in college could be learned in a few months on freaking Youtube.

They force you to do things in a specific way, add pointless deadlines, waste your time and mental energy with stupid, badly thought-out lectures... OF COURSE you're going to get burned out. Same if you try to do it as a job for some corporation.

Something you feel truly passionate about is best done on YOUR terms... not someone else's. But also, it's hard to truly focus on your interest when something else is irritating the heck outta you, or providing constant interruptions. I know I sure cant deal with that nonsense. I gotta have my own sealed off space. I think most of us do.

I would suggest trying it more... but slowly, and WITHOUT anyone telling you what to do. No class, no course. Mess around with it, a little at a time. Watch similar animations on Youtube. Ponder ideas and concepts. Take it just one small step at a time. Exercise your creativity. This is how you overcome burnout.

But there's one other aspect, and I always tell people this when this situation comes up: Look for another hobby. I dont mean "replace that hobby with something else". I mean, find another hobby, so you have more than just one interest. It's not good to get stuck in a rut of doing the same thing over and over... down that road lies only madness. Variety is important... this is a lesson I learned the hard way.

Believe me, you arent the only one to go through this sort of thing. It's common. Very common.
 
I'm with Pats- physically can't folloe my passion for diving and snorkeling anymore due to worsening COPD. Have taken up computer games (most recently Final Fantasy 14 instead but really miss the water. Probably one of the oldest gamers on the game too , LOL.
 
You are fluid, you may go back to this when you feel less stress. l gave up stained glass during my marriage meltdown heading toward divorce. Now l can't do it because of space and money constraints. Maybe you can find something similar? to your first love? But something a little less complicated.
 
Thank you for your responses. I may try to ease my way back into animation, or maybe find a new interest.

Just by saying 'try', you may have revealed that animation is not your proper path. There is another. Do. Or do not. There is no 'try'.
 
Last edited:
Sounds like me and photography. I loved all the aspects of photography until I had to make a living with it.

I was in love with physical science. I had to drop that too due to falling apart in high school and college. Just wasn't a failure I was able to recover from.
 
I've lost my special interests in the past and all of them have been useless anyway because it will never get me a job. None of mine have ever lasted from childhood because I have always moved onto a new obsession.
 
I assume when you initially did 3D modelling it was at home and not in a classroom setting? A bad environment can spoil anything you might enjoy.

I enjoy history, and at school we had an amazing teacher. At college the history teachers weren't good at all. They seemed dull and failed to engage my interest. Add to that, the fact I wasn't keen on anyone in class. So I felt lonely, and put off. We were even studying an era of history that I had a keen interest in - but still, I hated it. I ended up dropping out.

Nowadays I keep history solely as a hobby for me. I read books in my own time and at my own pace. Perhaps rekindling this interest in your own environment and at your own pace might suit you better?

Ed
 
@Raggamuffin has a great point. If it is your SI and then someone controls it by teaching you it may not work out so well, even if the teacher is good. A lot of us are really really in love with out SI and it's more than just learning. It become embedded into you, yourself, your mind, body and soul. Someone telling you how to engage in something that has formed your being or meant SO MUCH to you is like a slap in the face.

I guess I am trying to say a lot of us have a very deep emotional connection to our SI. Interference just upset that connection.

So maybe start one day, alone, embrace it again, love it again, let it soothe you like it did, talk to it, LOVE it! And let it love you back :)
 
Having more than one special interest sounds like a good idea!

And I can definitely say that there's a huge difference between doing things voluntarily or as a job (or you have to do it for other reasons...) I realised it firstly quite early in life. I had been interested in a certain era in history since I had been 12 and when we finally reached that point in history lessons (back then we went chronologically from Neanderthals via Egypts, Greek, Romans and the Middle Ages to the more modern times before finally ending contemporarily), the magic of it was gone and I didn't get any better marks than usually.

I like to write (but only when the muse inspires me) and photography came up a few years ago, so over the years I have been asked whether or not I would want to take up one of these interests as a further path of career.

Apart from the fact that in my part of the world you need certificates for everything to prove that you can do something if you want to go into a certain path (and I haven't got any for my interests), I am very happy to keep them as interests, exploring things at my own speed without unnecessary pressure from the outside.

Maybe that is truly the way with you as well.

Get away from the stress, find one or two different new interests and when the time is right, your sleeping interests will come back. Mine did do as well in the last few years, and it's been a blast to explore new angles and aspects.

So, yes, let it rest for a while, don't put yourself under pressure and one day you may discover a new aspect of it or something happens in the world of 3D animation that trggers you, and you'll be back.
 
My special interests have always been a bit of a revolving door. Some of them are lifelong, and come and go throughout my life (like art for instance) and some of them are passing phases that last a few years and then are gone like the wind.

I leave behind me a long string of sunk costs, hundreds (or thousands) of dollars spent on something I was passionate about for a few months, or years, and then lost interest in, either because something happened to make the thing unpalatable to me, or because it just faded from my life.

There are a few things that are all encompassing though, and those things pose a special challenge when something comes along to risk them. There have been times when I had to fight with myself tooth and nail to continue doing something after events happened that attached painful memories to my SI and made it very difficult to continue.

@Raggamuffin has a great point. If it is your SI and then someone controls it by teaching you it may not work out so well, even if the teacher is good. A lot of us are really really in love with out SI and it's more than just learning. It become embedded into you, yourself, your mind, body and soul. Someone telling you how to engage in something that has formed your being or meant SO MUCH to you is like a slap in the face.

I guess I am trying to say a lot of us have a very deep emotional connection to our SI. Interference just upset that connection.

So maybe start one day, alone, embrace it again, love it again, let it soothe you like it did, talk to it, LOVE it! And let it love you back :)

This is how it is for me, and I'm currently going through something like this with one of my interests/hobbies. At some point I realized I wasn't doing it because I love it anymore, I was doing it for other people. It was really a shock to me to see how far away from what I love (and the reasons WHY I love it) I had actually gotten. When I realized it, I tried to get back to doing it for myself only, for its own sake, and I had to fight for that...I felt like a fox with its leg in a trap really...my beloved hobby became more like a hostage situation. People don't understand, they see it as giving up, I see it as reclaiming what's mine.
 
I think my aspie husband has lost his special interest which is the most part of his identity, when he moved to my country.
 
I lost my lifelong special interest about 6 years ago due to a number of internal and external forces. It was unavoidable. I have been adrift ever since. I mean, I work full time and noodle about with a couple of things, but I'm just passing time. Nothing else captures my interest and brings me joy like it did. It's not good, but there's really nothing I can do about it but carry out my many duties in life regardless.
 
I lost my lifelong special interest about 6 years ago due to a number of internal and external forces. It was unavoidable. I have been adrift ever since. I mean, I work full time and noodle about with a couple of things, but I'm just passing time. Nothing else captures my interest and brings me joy like it did. It's not good, but there's really nothing I can do about it but carry out my many duties in life regardless.

I feel the same way, as if I'm floating through life without anything to keep my interest or deeply satisfy me like my special interest did. I do try to go back to it, but it doesn't feel the same.
 
Oh, you're not losing a special interest. You're still just a young pup! You're just fatigued and burnt out. Maybe your big dreams of the big city were more just a teenager wanting something more exciting than your home town.

Maybe you would like your line of work better, if you moved to a smaller area where the rent was cheaper, and you could work fewer hours, and not need a roommate (yuck- aspies and roommates don't mix!)
 

New Threads

Top Bottom