The Autistic INTJ Obsession Routine | Part 2

In part 1 video I shared with you is the predictable pattern of behaviours that happen when I fall in love with a new topic.

I’m lucky in a way because when I find a new interest I don’t exactly have to break up with the old one. The stereotypical autistic person, as portrayed so far in media, has one or two special interests. In the case of Sam from the Netflix show Atypical, this is Antarctica and Antarctic penguins; I don’t necessarily see him as a unique and genuinely relatable character for he embodies only stereotypical autistic traits which shouldn’t be expected in all cases of neuro-divergance.

This is one of the ways I differ from the autistic stereotype; metaphorically, I’m a serial dater.

Actually, I believe it’s my Se (Extroverted Sensing function) that eventually realises I need to take in more of the world which ultimately will help me become a better innovator for the future as I know more of what’s going on now. So with my autistic brain, I do have what is called “restricted interests,” but it’s what I do with them is still unique to the thinking of INTJs and the innovator quadrant (the types who use functions: Se, Fi, Ni and Te).

I dive into my interests very deeply compared to allistic persons and I cycle through my interests very quickly compared to the autistic stereotype.

On August 20th 2020, the day after I posted the video that was about my unique INTJ way of being obsessed with things I had a new motivation. A shot in the arm to say “Right! Going zero-waste is important and I don’t want that on the list of things that I seemingly abandon.” For the next while, my only focus was learning more about and practising sustainable living. Fortunately, at this time in the world, more people are trying to live more sustainably and more people are sharing their journey on YouTube which I see as a highly valuable resource to help me figure out how to do it for myself. I have shared what was doing on my Instagram if anyone’s interested in how I make my almond milk and what I’ve managed to put in my own containers.

Relating back to this video and the questions it proposed of why my consume habits are as they are I can say that it was around October 20th 2020 that I was ready to move my focus from Sustainable living in a general sense with broad applications. That’s 2 months of learning about bulk shopping, recycling, homemade recipes, composting, secondhand shopping, gardening, et cetera, and then I felt things shifting. Maybe because the new interest is time-consuming I don’t feel myself wanting to lump it in with the previous subject of Zero-waste even though it very well could be included.

I haven’t learned to implement sustainable habits into my life only to abandon them. This is why it’s difficult to draw the line as I would be able to name any future projects as low-impact or sustainable. It would be hard to say when I have moved on concerning the INTJ’s unique obsessiveness that I consider a phenomenon enough to write about for a blog post about personality. It’s because of how my brain works. I am an intuitive dominant type and my Ni (Introverted iNtution) would say, “Everything is connected.”

So here we are. Observing a pattern. That around the eighth week I felt the obsession switching. I no longer wanted to watch videos about basic zero-waste supplies, nor understand more about where cotton and plastics actually come from. But there is a definite segway at work from the previous subject. Like I mentioned in the video, now I’m in my 20s, my habits with my interests have got to a stage of recycling old things that I already have in my IxxJ Box and this next interest I’m now being mysterious about is something that I have done before.

What direction do you think my obsession took from there?

The answer: Sewing. Sewing my own clothes with dead-stock fabric and linens found in thrift stores to be specific.

So before I start sharing all the things I’m making (before turning this into a sewing blog), while I have fabric waiting to go into the washing machine, I thought I’d update the list of recycled obsessions to include sustainability and maybe we’ll all start to see a pattern emerge that not even I stopped to think about as it wasn’t until August the following year that I finally had an assessment to determine my brain type as autistic. Would it be easier if there were a wider category that all my hobbies fit into? Would it even make me better understood when people ask, ‘What are you into?’ Still, It’s too complicated to get saviour Ni (Introverted iNtuition) to consolidate itself. Even I find it hard to make dream interpretation, and playing the sims, and blogging fit into one objective category.

Considering I have Ni and Te as double-activated saviours it may be fitting to say that my hobbies are all related to construction as I’m now thinking about constructing clothes, before that I was constructing virtual houses, getting a degree for constructing songs. But I can’t very well say “I’m into construction” cause that’s going to make people think I’m a builder… and wanting to live in a tiny house was only ever a part of it.

Now I know that at least I am not so fickle that my hobby changes every month.

*Exact numbers are unknown, these are estimated periods.

What’s happening is something like 2-4 weeks* of building a foundational knowledge. In this time my perseveration is so strong I really cannot think of anything else. The perseveration has never been equal to my commitment or my loyalty, it is in fact the way that my brain is stuck on something and will not focus on anything else. It may though be equal to the mix of chemicals and hormones released when humans usually first “fall in love.” There’s obsessive-compulsiveness, desire, intrigue, excitement.

What follows is another say 2-6 weeks* building onto that framework and learning to implement the skills or habits or tools into my life.

Afterwards this it the part when loneliness might set in. Compared to the way that neuro-typicals enjoy their hobbies I will have already put in enough work to understand the topic that some perhaps would in a year. And yet I often have no one to share it with.

What last year I was calling Premature Expert Mentality is a more complicated phenomenon than totally labeling something as premature.

It’s out of respect for the passage of time that we think that someone can really become an expert in their field; if they have been doing something for a long time, putting in long hours of work learning and developing their skills or knowledge then we humans tend to respect that.

But think about the teacher you least liked in high school and tell me how long they had been in that job teaching that subject? Did you believe you were learning from an expert? How do they compare with your favourite teacher and how long that person had been teaching their subject?

What even is an expert anyway? I had originally linked the Premature Expert Mentality with lead blast low consume types; people who use extroverted decider functions with introverted observer functions in their saviour state. They have a tendency to want to do something with the new information they discover before taking in more as their brain has a very small appetite for new things and they want to build into what they already have to work with. I was trying to identify the lack of consuming that I generally do in my daily life. I was forgetting that consuming in the Objective Personality system is not at all the same as the action of consuming new information alone, it refers to the active seeking of new ideas and/or new situations and I was trying to respect the gathering of new observations.

But in calling myself a premature expert of anything I was failing to recognise that I genuinely have the mentality of being an expert based on having stayed in the same place consuming the same information until I felt that I knew everything inside that more narrow topic. And maybe it would be premature to say I understand everything about said field of interest but I have at least gotten myself to the place of being able to identify all the areas I have yet dived into, or I have in fact mastered one area, or I have learned everything that applies to myself (since consume is related to the seeking of new things for oneself).

I just hadn’t quite realised the difference between the speed of how I learn things that have my full attention and the rest of the population and that along with restriction of my interests come respect for how broad the subject really is. And what is part of my obsession is wanting is doing something innovative with the information and what I become focused on next is all part of one big thing that I believe I am slowly building towards.

Maybe that right there is the point that should be clear to the masses; calling Autistic people restrictive in their interests is ignorant of how vastly detailed and intricate many subjects happen to be, and although we like to stay in one area the subject is still as big as Antarctica.

This is all something I would like to really figure out, if I can put my attention to it. I would need to record more cycles of myself which could take years, and I would like to talk to more Autistic INTJs and other’s in the Innovator quadrent about how they experience their perseverance, and how they connect new interests from others they have built an understanding for.

Alternatively, I might just be able to say I’m just into creative things and I can get over it if I think that’s too clique; my enneatype in the bohemian after all.