Hyperfixating as a undiagnosed autistic

Being an undiagnosed autistic is one thing but hyperfixating all my life without knowing what it was until a couple of years ago is another. Having to live and breathe something to function without knowing why is sorta scary, it makes you feel crazy sometimes having to watch a certain film or theme your life around something e.g a band, a film or franchise, a book feels like a second nature to me but when I told anyone about it they thought it was weird. 

My first hyperfixations:

As almost every young child who spent the majority of their time trying to please their family I watched their favourite films with them, so from the age of since I can remember the Star Wars franchise, all 3 back to the future films, the Harry Potter franchise and grease have been some of my favourites. My dad always taught me to like the original star wars like return of the Jedi and a new hope. Back to the future was definitely the first film I really latched on to and i haven’t let go of it yet, doc blew my mind and my dad ingrained the sentence “I can’t believe they made a Time Machine out of a delorian” into my head because he says it at least once a month. My love for the 80s was kick started by my parents they grew up in the 80s and showed me almost all the classic stuff, so when grease became one of my favourites I wasn’t surprised, I had the carnival scene memorised by 9. So yes I cried when Olivia newton-John died. 

Current hyperfixations: 

I could be here for days telling you about every hyperfixation I’ve had but here are my current ones: beetlejuice (the film), the nightmare before Christmas, back to the future, Metallica, iron maiden, mötley crüe, stranger things and d&d. My whole life is basically centred around these things, I’m constantly consuming media from these things, my room is covered in posters of them and I own almost all of them on some form of physical media. Dnd is still a fairly new one so I’m still learning but I’m having a hard time stopping myself from buying this set of dice on etsy, I want to get a few of the handbooks first though. I guess we’ve all guessed where I found iron maiden and Metallica from but they’ve kept me afloat for 10 months so I owe a lot to them. I knew about motley crue before the dirt but when I watched it that’s when I started to fixate on them. I’m going to see them in July and I am probably going to cry (sorry dad who will have to drag me out of the stadium).

The scary side: 

Yes hyperfixations can be fun and they are 90% of the time but sometimes they aren’t I’m only speaking from my experiences :) sometimes I get so fixated on something that I ignore my body, I’ve been dehydrated so bad that I almost passed out before, I’ve forgotten to eat or get changed and even get out of bed because I was so concerned about getting every piece of information from this one thing into my body even if that means ignoring what’s good for my body. I’ve missed school because I stayed up so late shoving the media and facts into the filing cabinets of my brain so much that I slept for a good 9 hours. I’ve stayed up til 2/3 am cosplaying and trying to get the perfect content then falling asleep in the cosplay because i was so exhausted. I’ve turned down plans and family time because i was so engrossed in this new film or band or new series that I couldn’t leave my room until I finished it, made theories and finished their discography. It’s scary that my brain is able to ignore my body’s needs just to get that little bit of serotonin. 

I don’t speak for everyone but this is what I’ve experienced