Are Autistic Hobbies Really Obsessive?

Several Decembers ago, I found myself with some newly acquired Christmas money in my pocket and some time off work with nothing to do. I went to the local hobby shop to find something to remedy both of these problems. While perusing the plastic model aisle, my eye caught a Master Grade Gundam Mk-II. I wasn't especially familiar with Gundam at the time, but the fact that it was like an action figure that you build from a kit shot the cool factor off the charts.

After discovering the variety of Gundam models available, I quickly developed a new hobby. My latest project, which I just finished applying the decals to yesterday, was a Perfect Grade Unicorn Gundam, complete with the LED unit and Full Armor unit. It took me nearly a week to build it all, and another week just to apply decals.

Full disclosure, I am not a professional model builder, nor do I aspire to become one. I would not say that what I build is suitable for display outside my own place of residence. I just enjoy building Gundam models, as well as similar types of robot models from Japan, and then posing them and displaying them.

The only reason I bring this up is because of hobbies.

One of the defining traits of autism is obsessive hobbies. Activities that we will tend to devote most of our free time to. They stay on our minds when we aren't doing them, and we talk about them a lot to other people. Whenever our minds idle, they tend to gravitate toward our hobbies.

To be honest, this is a concept that I find difficult to understand. To me, the above paragraph defines not an obsessive hobby, but a hobby. If something doesn't fit that description, I consider it to by at most a mild interest.

That has made me wonder how it is that an autistic person's interests differ from those of a neuronormal person.

To be clear, I'm not talking about obsessions that we might consider unhealthy, that negatively impact other parts of the person's life. Things like hoarding decades' worth of newspapers or losing your life savings to gambling. I'm talking about interests that those around us might be bothered or concerned by, but otherwise don't have many negative consequences, such as my Gundam hobby I mentioned at the beginning.

The first thing I think of when I hear “obsessive hobby” is how much time and resources a person spends on his/her hobby. It is true that when I'm in the middle of a project, I tend to spend the vast majority of my time working on it. Other times, I want to make sure I have adequate tools and supplies and a functional workspace.

This is not dissimilar to the habits of other autistic people I know. I personally know people on the autism spectrum who spend most of their free time painting, writing fan fics, or just sketching characters for future projects. I've also known people who spend their time drawing road maps or researching the weather or various points in history.

However, I have to ask how this differs from how a neuronormal person spends his/her free time. For example, I remember my mom used to spend hours alone in her sewing room. She seemed to lose track of what was else was going on while she was working. I also remember a coworker of mine, who enjoys metalworking, excitedly telling me about acquiring a $500 toolbox for his garage.

Another prime example is musicians. We all know how often musicians will take out their instruments and start playing, given the chance. They also tend to spend a lot of time and money customizing and maintaining their instruments. In fact, it would be fair to say that music is a full time hobby. Some may consider musicians to be obsessive, but I've never heard anyone describe that level of interest in music to be autistic.

So, if we're more obsessive about our interests, I don't think it's because of the amount of time and resources we put into them. Maybe it's how much we talk about our interests.

Again, I'm going to have to disagree. If you know a car guy, you have almost certainly seen pictures of his latest accomplishment. It's not unlikely that you've even seen before and after pictures, along with verbal descriptions of what he's done. He's not obsessive. He's just sharing his interest with you, whether you care or not.

I'll also have to point to sports culture. Before and after every game, I'm always surrounded by talk of football, something I have absolutely no interest in. People talk about not only the players and coaches, and who they think will win and why, but also how the results of the game will affect the rest of the season and who will go to the playoffs.

This aspect of sports culture is fully acknowledged and accepted, as evidenced by the fact that some will ask that others around them not talk about the game that they recorded to watch later. That request is almost always respected.

Of course, when an autistic person is talking about his/her hobbies, the conversation seems a little more one-sided. I will not dispute that. However, I will dispute that it's indicative of obsession. You have to remember that autism is a social disability, which affects our conversational skills. We have a tendency to monologue at people when we talk, no matter what the subject is. Taking that into consideration, I think we can discount that as well.

Looking at the evidence, I think it's only reasonable to conclude that either autistic people are not obsessive about their hobbies or that neuronormal people are. It's simply a normal human behavior, filtered through a different type of brain.