Special Interests

Autistic special interests are an intense interest in a certain subject, activity or hobby that goes beyond the usual level of interest that neurotypicals would experience, and is often a source of enjoyment and comfort to autistics. An individual might want to learn everything there is to know about their area of interest and/or participate in it all the time.

A myth about special interests is that the person's particular interest fixed and permanent, but this isn't the case in reality. I've had 2 main interests that I can remember between my early teens and now. The first one being Pokémon, which started way back when the Pokémon card craze was going on. I'm often reluctant to try or explore new things, so just like with most other things I got into it late. It started when I was with my 2 cousins who collected Pokémon cards. We were in Woolworth's at one point (yeah, that's how long ago it was) and their dad was buying them a pack of cards each, so he got me one as well. I really don't know why but I was hooked pretty much straight away from there. I remember the very first card I saw when I opened that first pack was Zapdos and I think I must have been intrigued by this spiky, yellow, electric bird, especially when I found out that it was a legendary Pokémon.

From there my interest steadily grew and I went on to collect more cards, games, posters, VHS/videos (DVD's hadn't made it big yet back in those days... Christ, how old is this making me sound?!) and everything else you could think of. I couldn't do it now, but at the time I used to be able to name all 151 original Pokémon in numerical order off the top of my head. I've never understood why Mew is number 151, and Mewtwo is 150, when Mewtwo is a clone of Mew, but I digress. I remember getting a Game Boy Colour and Pokémon Yellow for my 14th birthday. It was a school day and I had a quick go on it that morning and really didn't want to go to school. Outside of school hours I spent literally all day every day playing it because my parents would let me do next to nothing but play video games ever since I was little. I even remember at one point I would listen to the song Double Trouble from the album 2. B. A. Master on repeat for literally hours at a time.

I can't remember a specific point where my Pokémon interest started to wind down, but I definitely remember how much I got bullied for liking it and I also remember not caring and carrying on liking it and making no secret of it. At the end of the day it was my special interest and it meant pretty much everything to me at the time so I wasn't going to let a few nasty kids at school stop me enjoying it. My next special interest was pro wrestling, started again by the same cousins who got me into Pokémon. We used to spend a lot of time together as we're a similar age, although I'm the oldest, and they used to bring the WWF Smackdown! video game to my house and we'd play it on the original Playstation. There was an overlap for a while between wrestling and Pokémon, but I think eventually wrestling took over. I remember playing the game and being captivated by characters like Stone Cold Steve Austin (my all time favourite wrestler), Kane, The Rock, Triple H etc.

From playing the game (no pun intended) I moved onto watching Raw (known as Raw Is War at the time) and Smackdown! on the telly. This was just at the start of the WCW/ECW invasion angle and I think the war between the then-WWF and the Alliance helped to lure me in. Stone Cold Steve Austin was the heavyweight champion, Shane and Stephanie McMahon had just bought WCW and ECW respectively to try to run their dad and the WWF out of business, and The Undertaker's wife was being stalked by a mystery man who a couple of episodes later turned out to be Diamond Dallas Page wanting to be made famous. This was closely followed by my first wrestling pay per view King Of The Ring 2001 where Edge won the King Of The Ring tournament, Kurt Angle wrestled 2 tournament matches before taking on Shane McMahon in a street fight where Shane was suplexed through 2 glass panels. This bit stands out because he was meant to go straight through each one on the first attempt, but the suplexes to both panels were botched and Shane landed on his head with each one but still got up and tried again. Kane teamed up with Spike Dudley to take on the Dudley Boyz, and the main event was a triple threat match for the WWF championship between Stone Cold Steve Austin, Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit.

While WWE has changed completely since those days I'm still a die hard wrestling fan 18 years later, although there was a period of a few years between 2010 and 2014 where I stopped watching because I hated the anonymous general manager gimmick that they were running on Raw. I'd always been aware that there were other wrestling promotions outside of WWE, but I wasn't aware of any specific ones other than TNA (now re-branded as Impact) which I'd tried to get into before but couldn't. It wasn't until after I started watching WWE again that I became aware of other companies such as New Japan Pro Wrestling. It was also after I got back into WWE that I discovered the British independent scene when I saw a poster for a Leeds-based company called Grapple Wrestling when I lived over that side of Yorkshire, and I started attending their live shows as regularly as I could. I wish I'd known about other promotions during my break from WWE because I was still very much a wrestling fan in that time, it's just that I didn't watch it because I didn't like the product that WWE were putting out at the time and wasn't properly aware of any alternatives.

There was also a difference in how I watch wrestling when I came back in 2014. From 2001 to 2010 it was a very much more naive view of just this is the product they're giving us, I like it. Whereas when I came back to it in 2014 I started to learn more of the ins and outs of the wrestling industry itself, getting a bit more involved in the online community and learning from there about booking, what a mark is, what being/going over is, what a jobber is and so on. So from 2014 onward I watched it more through the eyes of a critic than I had done before, and I think this reflects a difference in the fandom as a whole between 2010 and 2014.

So there you have it, those are my 2 big autistic special interests in my life. Like a lot of autistic people I rely on my special interests to help me escape the world we live in, and if it wasn't for autism and/or my interest in wrestling I might not even have the job I've got now. This is because when I had my interview back in 2016, one of the tasks was to write a short essay about anything I wanted to. Of course, I chose to write about wrestling and massively put it over about how I love the athleticism, the larger than life characters, the stories, the fact that they have to be so many different things all at once. They have to be athletes, actors, singers, comedians, models and so much more depending on their gimmicks and the angles that are running.

I'll stop rambling in a minute and leave you with just 1 last thing. Wrestlemania 35 is coming up, and there's been a lot of speculation about who Kurt Angle will face in his retirement match. It's been said by a few people online and I 100% agree that Kurt's final opponent should be John Cena. I remember watching the episode of Smackdown! in 2002 where John Cena debuted and lost to Kurt Angle. We'd never have known back then that Cena would go on to become the mega star that he is today, and the face of the company for so many years. So with that, and with the wrestling tradition that when you retire you put someone else over on your way out, it'd be so fitting to bring it full circle and have Angle retire in defeat to Cena on the grandest stage of them all.