For a while now I have been considering the fact that I may be autistic on top of having ADHD. Having one without the other is rare. It started when I saw things on TikTok about how pretty much all autistic people do these certain things that I do. I have taken online tests and they all say that there is a good possibility I have autism. The one piece that I couldn’t place was a special interest.
Special interests are pretty much a common staple with autism. When it comes to ADHD, hobbies come and go and you will probably spend a decent amount of money on a hobby and then not touch it for a year after weeks or months of loving it. I have had a lot of hobbies over the years, but not really any special interests, until I realized something. When I was a kid I wanted to make movies (content creator wasn’t a thing back then). I’d want to write, direct, star in, do pretty much everything with it. After weeks of writing though, I would change gears and decide to turn it into a play instead of a movie. Now I will focus on writing blogs and articles and other things and then change to making videos and pictures, etc. So in some ways my special interest has always been content creation.
That’s not the only special interest I’ve had. Computers too. In college I wanted to get certified in everything and took computer classes that would have covered a lot of different majors and certifications. I wanted to code, build them, build networks, etc. Now I’m a web developer and I always try and find new ways of doing things. When there’s a new feature that I can do something I’ve never done before, I get excited about it. When I get a new piece of hardware, I can’t wait to put it in.
In some ways I’ve combined the two special interests when it comes to creating content with games and streaming. New programs, new commands, new things to do with the stream, etc. Streaming has somehow took both interests and combined them. Come to think of it, that might be why I don’t necessarily focus on trying to grow. I focus on the actual stream process and interesting things to do. I know I should focus on growth, the more growth, the more things I could do with the stream, but that part doesn’t hold my attention.
When it comes to hobbies, I tend to drop them after a bit of time. I have noticed that if I want to get back into a hobby, I can find a problem and try and come up with a solution. It’s temporary, but I can usually hyper focus on the problem until I find a solution. Sometimes that solution results in me spending more money on the hobby though. Sometimes it’s hard to care about a problem enough to focus on it though.
If you have ADHD, how do you get back to focusing on things? Are you’re autistic, what are your special interests? If you’re auDHD, do you too have a main special interests with hobbies that go along with it?
