“I don’t think I have a special interest”
I hear this sentence in my office more than almost any other. It usually comes a few sessions in, after a client has started to recognize themselves in the autistic or AuDHD profile and then runs into the stereotype. I don’t know every train schedule. I’m not obsessed with dinosaurs. I just... like a lot of things. Really intensely. For a while.
Then, often in the same breath, they’ll mention that they’ve read forty books on attachment theory this year. Or that they rebuilt their entire budget system three times in a month. Or that they can’t watch a movie without researching the director, the cinematographer, the filming locations, and the historical accuracy of the costumes before the credits roll.
That’s the special interest. It’s just wearing a very good disguise.
For highly masked autistic adults, especially those who were also labeled “gifted” or “mature for their age,” special interests don’t disappear. They learn to dress for the room. Over the years they get quietly reshaped into forms the world rewards: expertise, ambition, self-improvement, being “the friend who knows about that.” They become so woven into personality and career that nobody thinks to call them what they are, including the person who has them.
This essay is a field guide to those disguises. It’s the list I wish I could hand every new client who says “but I’m not *that *kind of autistic.”
How Special Interest Learn to Pass
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