This is the second part of my series of 30 Days of Autism Acceptance.
April 15th: Talk about special interests. What is your current special interest? What do you like about it? Do you dislike anything about having special interests? Talk about past special interests.
My special interests are very far-reaching, but I also have some very...small? Niche. That's the right word. Niche special interests.
Without further ado, they are: Airplanes/aviation in general, motorsports (F1 particularly), vehicles of all kinds, computer science in general, artificial intelligence in specificity (I know, I know, bad on this hellsite), and, most recently and strongly: The Sacred Harp. I have no fucking clue how it became my special interest, but I will tell you that it has literally consumed my life to the point that I can't think of anything else if you give me room for my thoughts to wander.
Formerly: Music performance (before hyperacusis and my hand injury fucked me over on that one), neurodivergence itself, Club Penguin, Animal Jam trading.
I've had many of these special interests for an extremely long time, to the point I have a timeline in a document because I can't remember how long I've had them, and sometimes it's fun to track the evolution of a SpIn, or multiple, over time.
More about each of them, and how they came into my life, under the cut:
The oldest special interest of mine, for sure, is aviation.
I often say that my blood is instead jet fuel, that my bones are bound for the skies. It's true. I rattle as one with every single engine that roars overhead. We are kindred souls. Often denigrated, respected by few, rarely greeted as an old friend. Each ship has a story, to me, and when I see one I've flown on before, I have a deep and unwavering attachment to her, and I know that things are right in the world when there is the deep rumble of a 737 overhead as they come on final approach to my local airport. I am, simply, a flight computer with too many sensors (or, not enough, but all of them are faulty at the same time, so it feels like too much?) in an unfortunately human body.
After airplanes came vehicles. I can tell most engines apart just by sound, and generations of cars are instantly recognized by sight. I've always wanted to drive and feel the open road under throttle and rubber, and when I finally learned how, I gained a sense of newfound freedom. Cars, too, have personality and soul, and it's up to us as the humans who inhabit them to listen. How they cough under cold start, and give us their all when we push them to. I don't love all cars equally as I do airplanes, though. I'm fond of the Ford Mustang as a specific model family, and in general, cars from before the 1970s. Modern cars repulse me, with rare exceptions.
(You would assume that since I am a fan of planes and automobiles, I like trains too, right? But, not really. I just like planes and cars.)
Further on, when I became a little more sentient and gained access to the internet, I got to play online games, and they became strong special interests for me. Club Penguin is still near and dear to my heart and I miss it every day. Animal Jam, not so much, as the spiked-collar trading part of the game completely made me lose interest. But with those online games came my foundational knowledge of: I want to know how they did it.
And programming came into my life because of that. I started programming, learning Scratch and Swift Playgrounds (right when Swift was introduced, mind you), when I was still in elementary school. My folks said, you know, this is a good interest, but they didn't understand it at all. They dutifully signed me up for programming camp every summer. I got better, learning other languages along the way, taking every single computer science or programming class I could in school. Even though it was completely a foreign language to my parents, it truly was — and still is — my native tongue. (I admit that people who do not speak brackets and semicolons scare me.)
Aside from all of that, I was playing cello, a lot. I was damn good at it, I'd say. But the hours I poured into it caused my hand injury, unfortunately, and I was pretty much forced by the pain and numbness of it all to retire that special interest. Something that causes shooting, burning sensations all the way up my arm to the shoulder, leaving me numb and forcing me to play by sight instead of by feel, will kill your enjoyment of your instrument. But I still loved music, and I sought it as much as I could. When I was starting on the long road of "recovering from" my hyperacusis (something that could be a post of its own), I had to find something that I could look forward to doing again without making my hands worse. Some of that drive went into arranging and composing, but a lot of it was left vacant.
I found a lot of comfort in sacred music during the early days of traveling that road, as it often reflects a journey that we all must undertake. That, and it was often one of the only safe things that I could listen to without pain.
So I'm on YouTube one night, and I found this video, and I was like, wait a second? Why are all of them in a square? Why does it have a name AND a number, and why do all of my recommendations follow the same format?
Then the lyrics actually hit me from the second verse:
Then let our songs abound,
And ev’ry tear be dry;
We’re marching through Immanuel’s ground
To fairer worlds on high.(481, Novakoski)
A lot of watching the Sacred Harp singers in Cork, Ireland, followed. Babylon is Fallen. Jefferson. Antioch. Stratfield. I wanted to get to know the whole book. (Little did I know that said book had 554 songs at that time). I was like, wow, this is really cool, and the words touched upon a lot of things that regular sacred music didn't. Sacred Harp didn't try to conceal the hardness of life with "God will heal, and everything will be fine," but instead greeted me with "death, like an overflowing stream" (50t, 181, etc.) and "still drags her downward from the skies, to darkness, fire, and pain" (29b, 419, etc). And these singers did it with the level of joy that I used to have when playing cello.
I realized next, watching this clip from Lawless, how full and embodied the sound of Sacred Harp truly is. The level of overwhelm the main character feels when in this scene is often the same as what I know outside of the hollow square. I watched it again to experience the view of the character, and realized what the singers were singing outside of the "fa sol la" at the beginning part of the clip:
Do not I love Thee, O my Lord?
Behold my heart and see!
And turn each cursed idol out,
That dares to rival Thee.(39t, Detroit)
The next part of it came to me, and I realized that what these people were singing was harmonically intense in the way of a full orchestra, but I could not pick many parts out. How did that work? Then the fuguing tunes came across my recommendations. And I realized there were only four, if not three, parts on the page.
Sacred Harp came to my life as a love letter to the traditions I used to know and work in, while respecting what I should hear in the present, and blending them together to make something I could cherish.
I have yet to go to a singing. But I know when I do, I will feel the force of the sound through me, and I will feel the same rightness I do when I see one of my old friends on final approach.
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