Fixations: The Good, the Bad, and the Strange

Why the hell can’t we choose our own hyperfixations? I mean, if I’m going to obsess over something to the point of it literally overtaking my life, I feel like I should have at least some say in the matter.

And why does my brain never choose to fixate on something like diet or exercise? Or, at least, why does it never choose to fixate on those things for longer than a week and a half? Just long enough for me to impulse buy a new athleisure wardrobe and try some healthy eating fad I saw going around online, but never long enough to become an actual habit.

Instead, my brain likes to hyperfixate on things like baking my way through my favorite dessert blogs—shout out to Sally’s Baking Addiction for feeding my own addiction—buying fun new pens to make dozens of lists I’m never going to follow, or, my husband’s personal favorite, spending hours on end going down one dark rabbit hole of scary medical information on Google after another.

After six and a half hours of scouring the internet, I may not know why my skin itches so bad, but I can absolutely tell you the first ten signs of kidney failure.

Honestly, at this point, I would settle for being able to choose the timing or at least the duration of these fixations. It should definitely be possible to assign short-term or long-term to appropriate activities.

I have been known to spend six months or more knee deep in a fandom hyperfixation filled with hours upon hours of watching YouTube content, reading fanfiction, and picking apart even the most out there theories regarding the content. I’ve watched the house fall into disarray as I promised myself for the eighteenth time that I would step away from the hurts-so-good redemption fic I’d been binge reading for the last three days. Unfortunately, my promises don’t mean much in those moments. I’m a pushover and I know it.

While those sorts of fixations can last months, if not years, this past year, I impulse bought the paint to re-do the grout for the kitchen backsplash and got so involved I almost forgot to pick my kids up from school. Almost, I swear I didn’t actually forget them. Then, by the time I was about halfway through the job, I suddenly—and infuriatingly—lost interest. It was two days and several dozen pointed comments from my husband before I begrudgingly finished.

And, let me tell you, it took so much mental effort to convince myself to complete the task that I would have felt justified demanding a parade be thrown in my honor.

I’d pay an unreal amount of money I don’t have to have a control switch installed in my brain to operate my hyperfixations. For as long as I can remember, these fixations have posed problems in my day to day life. Forgetting to do homework, neglecting to eat, not getting enough sleep, missing out on plans with friends. But, it wasn’t until I became a parent that this issue became critical.

How am I supposed to parent my kids properly when I am deep in the weeds with my latest hyperfixation, unable to tear myself away to tend to my own basic needs, let alone theirs?

I remember when my daughter Maddie was just over a year old, I discovered a new series of books by my favorite author and completely lost myself in the world. It felt physically painful to tear myself away, back to the real world. Every time I had to step away it was like I wanted to peel my skin off in layers to escape the feeling.

Now, before anyone calls CPS, I did manage to tear myself away, and I did take care of my kids’ needs—they were changed, fed, watered, and kept safe. What they weren’t was engaged. Even almost three years later, I still feel guilt over that hyperfixation episode. Whether that guilt is deserved or not, I still haven’t figured out. My therapist and I are still arguing over that point.

That wasn’t the first occasion, or the last, where my hyperfixations have led to me feeling like an absolutely shit mom. The crappiest parent on planet Earth. How could I let myself get so absorbed in something so seemingly trivial that my kids’ need for my time and attention fell to the side?

Even now that I’m diagnosed and am able to better identify what is happening when such fixations hit, I still struggle to set them aside when Real Life comes calling. I think it’s something I’ll struggle with all my life.

Though, if someone just happens to have any tried and true tips or tricks for balancing hyperfixations with the reality of day to day life, shoot me a message! I’m willing to try pretty much anything.

And, it’s not just the time and focus that hyperfixations take up that cause problems. There’s also the stuff!

At this point in my thirties, I’ve collected a metric crap-ton of widely varied hobbies and half-finished projects stashed throughout the corners of my life. No matter how hard I try, even if I haven’t re-visited that particular fixation in years, I find myself unable to part with any piece of it. I joke around with my dad a lot about his inability to get rid of anything. The joke is on me though, I guess, since it turns out I’m just like him in that regard.

I have two guitars currently sitting in my attic. They haven’t been played in probably fifteen to twenty years—and God do I feel old saying that—but, every time I go to sell them or donate them, the dark shadowy part of my brain whispers, ‘you could still be a rock star one day’. And I believe it every single time, despite having realized time and again that I have neither the coordination nor the patience to learn to play. And, if I’m being honest with myself, I also lack the charismatic stage presence required to be a rock star. Still, you never know. And so, the guitars stay.

I have boxes of craft stuff stashed in my office closet that I bought with only the best of intentions. I spent weeks doing research, trying to teach myself the various techniques involved in whatever the latest project was, only to eventually lose interest. But, I may circle back around to that fixation eventually. You never know.

And that is the infuriating thing. You really never know. There have been fixations that I circle back to every few months to every few years, and ones I literally never touch again. But there is no way to know which way it will go down until it does. So, why risk getting rid of anything when you could wake up next week suddenly ravenous to know everything about sewing your own clothes?

One thing I have learned over the last year or so since my diagnosis, is that hyperfixations are different from your special interests. Hyperfixations tend to come and go as the dopamine associated with the task fluctuates. Special interests, however, tend to be more long term.

Ask anyone who knows me, and my special interests are pretty in-your-face-obvious.

For as long as I can remember, books have been a part of me, of who I am. I remember being little, pre-reading age, begging my parents for one more story before bed. Then, once I was a little older, getting in trouble for staying up late reading by flashlight. Throughout my life, the amount I read has varied widely, mostly due to the often-understated inconvenience of Real Life. But even during those stretches of time where I wasn’t reading, books and stories still held a special place in my heart. And not just reading them, but writing them as well.

I’ve always wanted to be a published author. I can remember being in elementary school, stating that dream with confidence when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. As it does for most of us though, life has a way of wearing you down over the years and coloring those once rosy dreams with cynicism. But somehow, no matter how much the overall improbability of my becoming a blogging sensation or best-selling author nags at me, I still can’t seem to stay away for long. Writing is a part of me. One I wouldn’t want to do away with even if I could.

So, while I may fixate on certain writing projects—and trust me, there is a heaping pile of half-finished manuscripts in my past—the act of writing itself is something special to me that I am certain will never really leave me.

I guess that’s one fixation I don’t mind sticking around.