In this blog series, I am getting curious about attention. Why can it be so hard to pay attention to the things we want to? Why do we give so much attention to things we’d rather not? And how can we harness our attention? I approach these questions from a personal perspective, in the hope that this may in some small way contribute to ongoing conversations about how we can practice attending to what really matters.
This is post two out of five. You can read part one here.
One sunny August evening at the Stockholm Water Festival in 1996, my life changed. On my family’s annual visit to Sweden, I, together with my one local friend, went to see the rock/pop band Garbage. I already had their debut album, which I had listened to a fair bit, but that night things changed. Seeing the band’s singer, Shirley Manson, perform live, I was hypnotised. By the time Shirley signed my ticket stub after the show, I was a capital F Fan.
My love of Garbage/Shirley felt like the defining aspect of my identity in my late teenage years. I listened to their music every day. I collected magazine clippings and all the singles. Whenever I could get online, I searched for information about them. Once I had my own email account, I joined a fan listserv, where hundreds of us gathered to discuss all aspects of the band and the music. I learned HTML so that I could create my own fan-site. I got knee-high boots and wore them with a corduroy miniskirt, like Shirley.
I finally had the opportunity to see the band live again after they released their second album. By that time, I was at university in London, and they had reached the dizzy heights of a sold-out Wembley Arena gig. A couple of days later, desperate to stave off the despair that descended after such a monumental and highly anticipated event, I got a train to Manchester to see them again, hanging around with other fans outside the venue in the early afternoon to catch a glimpse of the tour bus as it arrived.
I have had many other intense, passionate interests in my life, both before and after my Garbage era. None have been as intense (although my Jodie Foster phase in my early teens may be a close second!), but usually there is something or someone occupying a lot of my thinking and feeling space. In my younger years, it was animals, then pop stars, actors and musicians. In my adult life, people have continued to feature, but also broader subjects, such as feminism and, in more recent years, writing and creativity.
It was reading about what autistic “special interests” can look like for those of us socialised as girls/women that sparked some of my initial recognition of myself as autistic. One of the reasons why our neurodivergence is more likely to go under the radar is because our interests may sit within normative cultural expectations (it is not unusual for young people assigned female to be fans of pop bands or to love animals, for example). There is also a stereotype that autistic people’s interests don’t change over time, which is not true for many of us. The divergence lies mainly in the intensity of our interests.
But this blog post is not only about autistic special interests. More generally, what I’m exploring here is interested attention: when our attention is immersed in a topic that is deeply interesting to us. I want to make a case for the importance of honouring this form of deep attention and everything that it can bring to our lives.
the wisdom of our interested attention
Over the last few years, I have had periods of time (ranging from a couple of weeks to a couple of months) when I’ve intensely immersed myself in learning about, reading and writing poetry. Notably, they have coincided with times when I’ve been feeling particularly overwhelmed.
I find this so interesting to notice: when I am overloaded, I turn to poetry – as a creative outlet of personal expression, but also as a form of art that I want to submerge myself in and learn about. Perhaps it’s because poetry doesn’t demand as much linear “sense-making” and explanation as prose writing. In times of overwhelm, writing narrative, coherent prose can feel like too much. But, as I still find reading and writing meaningful, my attention switches to poetry. It seems almost subconscious. Poetry is an invitation to slow down and pay attention to the beauty and wonder of words – an invitation my subconscious accepts.
This kind of detailed, sensory and slow attention can also direct me towards beauty in my physical surroundings. When I am walking along the streets in my neighbourhood, my eyes and hands gravitate to small details: the pattern created by paint peeling off a doorway, the texture of moss on a wall, the contrast of colours on a rusty fence. While intense sensory attention has its downsides, it gives me an appreciation of the beauty of small things. A well-crafted sentence. The quality of light in a room. It is a kind of creative attention.
With both poetry and my physical surroundings, it is like my body knows that this is what I need before the conscious part of my being does – it directs me towards things that absorb my attention in a creative, vibrant way. Overwhelm for me often manifests in the form of withdrawal and shutdown – a state that can be hard to think my way out of. Instead, I am learning to let this different kind of embodied wisdom lead me towards the things that interest me and call my creative attention, leading me to regulate my nervous system and feel more connected.
letting go of shame
For a long time, I carried a lot of shame around my intense interests. I have often downplayed or hid them, seeing them as embarrassing obsessions – evidence that there was something wrong with me. Even now, over twenty years later, I feel some embarrassment writing so candidly about my Garbage fandom era and I had to fight the urge to mock my younger self.
Post-diagnosis, I’ve been trying to reframe this personal trait more positively. Part of my unmasking process has involved unpicking that shame and learning to honour my passionate interests – noticing what this passion brings and enables and allowing myself to embrace what is pulling me in, without “shoulds” or shame.
This can be easier said than done. Even as I was writing this post, I noticed a familiar “should” coming in. This part of me wants all my interests to in some way be useful – to go beyond pleasure and enjoyment for their own sake. Devon Price writes about this in Unmasking Autism:
If an adult fills their evenings after work learning to code or creating jewelry that they sell on Etsy, they’re seen as enterprising. But if someone instead devotes their free time to something that gives them pleasure but doesn’t financially benefit anyone, it’s seen as frivolous or embarrassing, even selfish. (p. 152)
I definitely notice this pull towards economic productivity in myself, but also, perhaps even more strongly, I notice a sense that I should be putting my time and energy towards something more “worthy” – that I should be spending the time I devote to my personal passions to doing things that directly contribute towards social justice struggles.
But I am pushing back on this. It is not an either/or. Embracing our passionate interests without shame not only gives us joy (which is enough of a reason in and of itself), but also helps us build our personal skills, strengths and creativity. When I think back to my Garbage era, what I remember most fondly was the connection with other fans. I dared show what felt truest about me to other people, which gave me practice in forming and being part of a community. Embracing the interests that regulate and nourish us builds our capacity to be in the world.
our passion is our creative fuel
This push/pull between what’s capturing our attention vs. what we think we should be doing to be “productive” or “useful” relates to our creative work, too.
When I’m in a poem-writing phase, I notice how quickly a judgemental voice enters, concerned about quality and progress. My poems are no good. Why am I spending time writing bad poems instead of writing blog posts or essays to submit for publication? When will my poetry be good enough to publish? I have to guard so fiercely against this voice – to protect the pleasure I get from playing with poetry without it immediately tipping into an external-oriented desire for recognition.
This is not to say it’s bad to be interested in improving my craft. But it is to say that we need safe space to play creatively with whatever feels most exciting (whether that’s making poems, collage or cakes). That space matters for its own sake. It reminds me of Sarah Teresa Cook’s powerful insistence that our personal creative practices matter: that “it is the act of making that enriches your life – not the reception of your output”.
Even if I never share any of my poems with another person, it still matters that I write them. It gives me pleasure and deepens my understanding of myself, my feelings and my relationship with the people and world around me. Not to mention that poetry is a whole other way of engaging with language and emotions – one that deepens my creative work across the board. Just as writing fan fiction or writing in a private journal helps hone our skills and attention as writers more generally.
Relatedly, I love how Marta Rose reframes the shame that often accompanies “serial hobbies” and “abandoned projects”. “Dabbling is so undervalued, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with loving novelty”, she writes, noting also that “[w]hen we disrupt shame and have patience, you will be amazed at how many of your abandoned projects turn out to be practice rounds for new pleasures and new projects sometime in the future”.
Following what calls our interested attention – even when it seems tangential or does not lead to any type “output” – matters to us as human beings just as it matters to our creative practice, building our attention muscles and capacity over time.
our interests help us regulate, create and connect
Our passionate interests are not shameful indulgences or evidence that there is something wrong with us. Interested attention helps us regulate, create and connect – with ourselves, first and foremost, but often also with others (human or more-than-human).
You may be protesting at this point that it isn’t all so rosy: that our attention can also get intensely hooked into things that do not feel regulating or nourishing at all, but rather the opposite. I’ll be exploring this in the next post, on distracted attention.
But, ultimately, it comes back to this: we can learn to listen to what our attention is telling us. When we notice our attention being pulled, we can practise discerning when something feels good in our bodies and when something is dysregulating (and some interests may well bring up a range of different responses at different times). In this way, we practise listening to our bodies. And when an interest genuinely does feel nourishing and regulating, and it’s not harming anyone else, we can practise giving ourselves permission to enjoy it and everything that it brings to our lives, without shame.