The Eruptions of Hyperfixations
During my twilight years of high school and early years of college, I was hyper fixated on a Japanese live action kids show known as “Kamen Rider.” To say it engrossed me would be an understatement.
San Juan; Texas — I usually think of people as volcanoes, emotionally I mean. We all are waiting patiently for an eruption, it could be random, telegraphed or of any emotion. Some eruptions can be angry and explosive, or happy with lots of interesting nuggets of facts. I am here to talk about the happy ones today, or as people in the ASD community like to call them, hyperfixations.
These wonderful eruptions are based on something known as “info dumping.” The word is pretty much as it says, dumping information onto someone. This is combined with hyperfixations as one is what gives the information in order to provide it, while the other is to dump it. With myself being in special education for most of my elementary school career, I have met many people who have different hyperfixations. Some can be things like “Barney,” “My Little Pony,” or “Spongebob.” Others can be about insects, animals or the Titanic. Heck, I've met people with 9/11 hyperfixations.
What matters though, is that regardless of these fixations, that we remember the human behind them.
For example, during my twilight years of high school and early years of college, I was hyper fixated on a Japanese live action kids show known as “Kamen Rider.” To say it engrossed me would be an understatement. I religiously consumed the available media and joined groups to show my love for the show. Was I well received by these groups? Not really, due to some of my personality traits like coming on too strong with people, but I am on good terms with some of them still to this day.
College, on the other hand, treated me like a pariah due to my autistic traits and fixation. I was too nerdy for the mainstream people who like the typical fare of reality shows and “Game of Thrones,” but too typical and esoteric for the nerdy people. Soon, my “Kamen Rider” fixation went dormant for my own good in order to survive college, but it never went away. It comes back in waves, but it will always be there like a security blanket.
Everything has interest and when there is interest, people flock to it. Just like volcanos, hyperfixations can be dormant, but unlike volcanoes, they can never die. We can temporarily move on, find something else to fully chew on and suck the bone marrow out of, until we go back to old reliable and begin anew.