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When the Light Flickers: Grieving a Fading Special Interest

On The Existential Uncertainty Of Shifting Passions

David Gray-Hammond

Oct 17

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There’s a particular ache that comes when a special interest begins to fade. It isn’t the clean sadness of a finished story or the satisfying end of a chapter, it’s something murkier, almost existential. A kind of quiet grief that seeps into the spaces where fascination once lived.

For many Autistic people, special interests aren’t hobbies in the way society tends to frame them. They are lifelines. They’re how we build meaning, regulate emotion, connect with others, and understand ourselves. They are a steady pulse of belonging and control in a world that often feels altogether beyond the grasp of our desired autonomy.

So when that pulse starts to weaken, when something that once filled every corner of your mind begins to slip through your fingers, it can feel like losing a piece of yourself. It’s the juxtaposed feeling of light fading both subtly and violently.

I’ve been there, more than once. There’s a strange kind of disorientation that follows, the emptiness of no longer having a gravitational centre. My monotropic mind, which thrives on depth and immersion, suddenly finds itself adrift. I start looking for the next thing to hold onto, but that search is never immediate or certain.

In those moments, I often feel guilt. I feel like I’ve abandoned something sacred. It’s irrational, of course; the interest itself isn’t a person, it doesn’t have feelings, but it felt alive while it was with me. It shaped me, gave me language, rhythm, purpose. It became part of the narrative of who I am.

When that interest dims, I wonder if the version of me who loved it is gone too. An identity that has faded into little more than memory.

There’s a cultural misunderstanding about Autistic special interests; that they’re obsessive, trivial, or childlike. This is, of course, incorrect; they’re the architecture of our inner lives. They allow us to metabolise experience, to translate chaos into coherence. Losing one isn’t just losing an activity; it’s losing a structure of meaning.

And yet, if I look closely, I realise the interest never truly disappears. It evolves. It leaves sediment; traces that become the foundation for what comes next. Each special interest, in its own way, is a fragment of selfhood that joins the others, forming something wider and wilder than any single fixation.

Perhaps this is what I mean when I talk about the Chaotic Self, a being in flux, continuously rewritten by every passion, every rabbit hole, every flicker of curiosity. The grief I feel isn’t for the loss itself, but for the transition, the uncertainty between one state of being and another.

So, maybe grief, in this context, is also an invitation. A moment to honour what was, to sit in the in-between before the next current pulls me somewhere new.

When we lose a special interest, we aren’t empty. We are in a sacred liminal space of infinite potential. A place of becoming that does not discard the past, but instead grows out and forward from it, a rhizomatic dissemination of new thought and identity. The soil is still fertile, even if the last bloom has withered. One day, without warning, something will take root again. A new spark, a new rhythm, another thread to follow down into the depths.

The light flickers, yes. But it never really goes out. Merely sustains enough energy to light the next candle.