My Lived Experiences With Special Interests

As far as my experiences with living on the autism spectrum and the special interests that come along with being autistic, my first special interest developed as a youth, around the age of six. Special interests in the autism spectrum entail that certain autistic people develop an interest and hobby in one or two areas and become so intensely focused on those hobbies that certain autistic people will dominate social conversations about their hyper-focused interests.

While the neurotypical population may have an interest or hobby that they like and talk about a lot, the difference is that the neurotypical population has enough self-awareness to reciprocate other people's interests, while with the autistic community, autistic people will completely revolve the conversation around their special interests and not reciprocate about other people's interests unless they are prompted to by others.

I am an autistic man who developed the self-awareness to learn how to reciprocate other people's interests, so that is less of a social barrier than in my youth, where I would not consider reciprocating and would dominate conversations about my hobbies.

I fell into that category when my special interest in the Pokemon franchise began as a six-year-old when I collected the Pokemon training cards, followed by the Pokemon movies, TV series, and video games.

I recall going to the local movie theater with my mother around that time to see the "Pokemon 2000" film, where the autistic self-stimulating motor movement of my legs shaking had to be regulated to avoid a commotion in the movie theater.

My favorite Pokemon characters were the Pokemon, Pikachu, and the human cartoon who carried Pikachu, Ash. I found the premise of Pokemon to be interesting and engaging at that time, the creatures with supernatural powers who used those powers in combat with each other. I am impressed that the Pokemon franchise has evolved all of these years later and I look back at my special interest in Pokemon fondly.

After I grew out of Pokemon, by the age of nine, my special interest transitioned into the hobby that I have retained since the age of nine and I intend on continuing that special interest for the rest of my life. That special interest is the professional wrestling industry, and that interest of mine has a very intriguing story to it.

I watched a movie called, "Teen Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain," which happened to feature a professional wrestling star from years ago named Hulk Hogan. My mother mentioned to me that Hulk Hogan was a professional wrestler, and my father had a professional wrestling event from the professional wrestling company, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), called WrestleMania V (5), recorded in the 1980s from an HBO airing on a video cassette tape.

I watched WrestleMania V on that video cassette, which featured the WWE's top stars of the time, and from there, I became interested in professional wrestling. I was flipping through channels one night and caught WWE's Monday night wrestling program, called RAW, and that date was August 4, 2003, two months before my tenth birthday.

I watched that episode of WWE RAW and began watching more regularly from there. My interest in wrestling progressed to watching the WWE programs very often, daily, and I then started collecting the wrestling action figures, along with a play wrestling ring, and would often irritate my family at home by banging the figures in that ring loudly.

The WWE presents monthly pay-per-view programs that feature certain wrestlers in high-profile match scenarios, some of those matches are more intense and some are just about a good athletic match, and before 2006, I could not watch those pay-per-views due to my household TV not having pay-per-view capabilities.

By 2006, my family had digital cable and pay-per-view, so my first WWE pay-per-view, which was recorded to watch since I had school the next morning, was WrestleMania 22.

WrestleMania 22 featured my favorite wrestler at the time, John Cena, in a WWE Championship defense in the featured match, the last match of WrestleMania 22, and Cena kept that championship in a scenario where Cena was heavily disliked by the fans and booed relentlessly throughout that match.

Ironically, Cena was meant to be the heroic wrestler against his rival at the time, a wrestler named Triple H, who was meant to be the villain. The WWE fans booed the hero and cheered the villain in that match, a highly unusual dynamic in professional wrestling at the time.

From then on, my wrestling fandom progressed even more, to getting the WWE merchandise, including the wrestler's T-shirts and similar apparel, and using the Internet to understand how professional wrestling works.

Professional wrestling often gets scrutiny and the fans get chastised for enjoying WWE due to the perception that the wrestling industry is based on the wrestling being "fake." People who do not watch wrestling with the passion that myself and other fans do, people I have interacted with socially, have questioned why I enjoy that "fake wrestling" so much. 

People who do not watch or follow WWE, but know the fact that the matches are choreographed and the outcomes are predetermined, meaning that the wrestlers are told they are winning or losing before their matches occur in front of fans, believe that wrestling is "fake" due to how that aspect of how wrestling operates.

As a WWE fan, I take exception to the stigma of the wrestlers I enjoy so much engaging in "fake wrestling" for the fans' entertainment, because the WWE wrestlers, and the other wrestlers in the wrestling industry, put their bodies through intense physical pain to entertain the fans.

Just because the truth of the predetermined outcomes is a fact, it does not mean that the wrestlers should have a reputation for their chosen jobs being "fake" and therefore, not worth watching.

The wrestling that WWE presents is painful to watch sometimes, and very difficult for the wrestlers to execute safely. Injuries happen a lot, and the wrestlers put a lot of effort into developing their skills for their matches and cooperating with their fellow wrestlers to ensure that the injuries are kept to a minimum.

I cannot count on ten fingers how often I was teased as a school student for enjoying professional wrestling, both because I had a hyper-focus on it due to being autistic, and for the general stigma of professional wrestling being "fake" in certain opinions.

I persisted as a fan of professional wrestling, and I am glad I did because as I aged, more people began respecting my fandom and I was able to enjoy social conversations about WWE.

I now enjoy WWE as a fan who understands very fully how wrestling works, and I enjoy it as much as if not more than when I started watching wrestling many years ago. I follow multiple wrestling companies simultaneously, and I will enjoy wrestling as a hobby for as long as wrestling is an active medium for entertainment.

Granted, I have been heavily encouraged to broaden my horizons to more hobbies for more social opportunities, since the neurotypical population may find conversing with me to be tiring if I overly elaborate about WWE more than the other person wants to talk about WWE.

However, I have more hobbies now. I have progressed in my reciprocal conversation skills to recognize when to discuss wrestling, minimize that habit, and ask my conversational partner about their hobbies. I have been praised by my family and people who know me personally for my growth in that habit, because for a while, my mother would have to interject in my prolonged wrestling chatter to say, "I don't want to talk about wrestling anymore, Mike."

I am more aware now of how to navigate conversations these days in the aspect of toning down the wrestling chatter to mainly other WWE fans, while certain people I know engage me in my wrestling chatter even when those people are not big fans themselves because they understand my passion for wrestling.

Between Pokemon and WWE, those two special interests have been at the core of my hobbies throughout my life, and in certain instances, WWE has been both an effective diversion on my challenging days and periods, as well as a cathartic hobby to enjoy and release some stimulation on my animated days.

As far as my special interest in Pokemon is concerned, I recall having a large book of Pokemon cards that I collected and organized in the book so that when I watched the Pokemon programs, I could be as immersed in the program with my book of cards as possible.

I am proud of my WWE fandom and grateful for it because, as a teenager in school, wrestling provided a good distraction from the challenges I had to deal with a lot. While I was mocked for my fandom, I stuck with it because I knew the truth about wrestling, and because it was a confidence booster for the struggles I navigated each day for a long time, in school and in general.

Overall, my special interests have been received with both understanding and much criticism due to a lack of understanding in some situations, and the encouragement to find new hobbies. Nonetheless, I stick to my wrestling because there are a lot of days when a WWE match is helpful for decompression and gives me some mental relief from stress, anxiety, and overall autistic life challenges. I love my special interests because I like myself for who I am.

If a person, namely a neurotypical, wanted to engage in a conversation but is not into professional wrestling as much as I am, a good way to connect is to understand that while WWE is my passionate hobby, I have other interests that I can discuss (e.g. sitcoms, the paranormal, certain documentaries about people in entertainment). 

People often think that all I want to discuss is wrestling, because that is the first thing I bring up; however, upon talking to me in a more lengthy manner, people will realize that my conversation can expand into more than just my special interest.

If a neurotypical is interacting with an autistic person, and the autistic person's special interest is overly discussed, a kind way to modify that habit is for the neurotypical to simply say, as I was told, "I understand that you like your hobby a lot, and I enjoy talking to you, you seem like an awesome person to talk to, but I would appreciate it if we could change the subject now please."

That is all that is needed to make the autistic person aware of that habit, and while I had that same sentence said to me more harshly, depending on the person, there is a kind way to let the autistic person know that without making the autistic person feel bad or inadequate to interact with.

It is all about the golden social rule: be nice, and try not to be too critical of the autistic community for that habit because it is not the autistic person's intention to sound that self-centered, that is how autistic people are naturally inclined to talk due to being on the autism spectrum.

If the habit of special interests in conversation is addressed and modified in a kind and constructive way, I guarantee that many autistic people will be receptive and learn from that, from personal experience.