The first episode of the Ruling Passions Project’s podcast is now live on the podcast page, and also on spotify and apple.
In episode 1 I talk to Pip Brown (they / them) about their ‘intense interests’ in Music and Portraiture. During the discussion we touch upon several topics including sensory experience, alexithymia, embodiment, LGBTQ+ heroes, visualisation, parallel play, flow and burnout… Some of the cultural reference points include David Byrne, Billy Tipton, Paul Ekman, Steve Reich and Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’.
Additional multimedia links and transcript available below…
Additional links for this episode are available here: https://shu.padlet.org/dscb18/2c8mzhuqphrfvrjk
Episode 1 Transcript
CB: [01:03] So I would like to welcome today’s guest, who is going to introduce themselves.
PB: [01:09] Hi, I’m Pip Brown, my pronouns are they/them. I’m a first year PhD student in development psychology and fairly recently diagnosed with autism and I’m quite keen to talk about my special interest, as always [laughter]
CB: [01:25] Thank you Pip, it’s nice to speak to you. Before we talk about specifically what you are particularly interested in and what we would classify as a special interest, I just want to ask a question about what you understand by the term ‘special interest’, and whether that term, special interest, is something you’re happy to apply to yourself.
PB: [01:41] Hmm, yes, it’s interesting. I was having a conversation with somebody just the other day, talking about the move in some circles away from talking about special interests and towards talking about intense interests, because for me it covers a whole sort of gamut of things. Things from sort of classic special interests in the way that we would understand if you were interested, and I mean a stereotypical example is trains, from a very young age, and that would be a life-long persistent special interest, and sort of more passing hyperfixations, and I know lots of autistic people who have a combination of the two.
[02:21] The intensity is the thing that links the kind of lifelong special interests and the kind of more transient hyperfixations. So yeah, I tend to think of them in terms of both special and intense interests.
CB: [02:40] That is really interesting and really useful and I think, having spoken to lots of people about their interests as part of this project, I think different people have different feelings about the term ‘special interests’, and I tend to try and say ‘what are often understood as, in literature as autistic people’s special interests’, but I know that different people have difference preferences in terms of terminology.
[03:00] So for you ‘intense interests’ feels like a good term?
PB: [03:05] Yeah, I think intense, for me, captures the subjective feeling of engaging with the interests a little bit more than special interests, because I mean, as you will know as well, the sense of flow, the sense of really intense excitement, the sense of wanting to share. That intensity is, I think, central to lots of autistic people’s kind of own experience of themselves. So for me that tends to capture it a little bit more than special interest. But it’s useful also have a term like ‘special interest’ that lots of people know and lots of people can kind of point to and relate to, even if they’re neurotypical.
[03:44] So that is another sort of interesting cul-de-sac that we could go down about non-autistic people’s use of the term ‘special interest’, which I know some people can get quite gate-keepy about. I don’t personally really have a problem with it.
CB: [03:56] Yeah, I think that these words have particular associations, depending on who is using them, don’t they. And it’s like if, as autistic people, we self-define as having special interests and we call them those, that’s maybe a different feeling, it has a different tone to someone else using the words ‘special interest’ to apply to someone else, as if it’s some kind of novelty or-
PB: [04:18] Hmm.
CB: [04:20] I think also because the term ‘special interest’ is quite embedded within a lot of the pathologizing literature I guess, it’s a problematic, but then across different groups of people, different people reclaim terms don’t they, in different ways.
PB: [04:33] Yeah, exactly, and I think special interest, special in terms of discrete, distinct, distinctive, as you said can feed into this notion of pathologizing. So a child whose special interest, autistic special interest is dinosaurs will be treated in a different way to a neurotypical child who’s super into dinosaurs, you know [laughter], and one is pathologized and one is not. Yeah, it’s interesting, it is one of those terms that is kind of expanding and contracting constantly in terms of what it means to different groups of people.
CB: [05:08] Yeah, the fluidity of language around these things is really interesting in itself, isn’t it. I think a discussion about these things is useful because it helps us to get perspectives of the people who the language is about, I guess. And maybe it gives people a bit more of a stake in the language that’s being used around them.
PB: [05:27] Yeah.
CB: [05:26] So, given that you are someone that recognises yourself as whatever we’re calling them, intense interests, special interests; you recognise yourself as this being part of your life and your lived experience. What things today do you think you would be talking about?
PB: [05:44] I mean I could talk about a whole number of things. I think the strongest intense interest that I have had and I’ve had since I was very young has been music, and in particular various types of music. I’ve had longstanding intense interests in particular composers but, for me, music as an intense interest is a kind of embodied interest in a way. It’s an interest, you know, I can feel as an autistic person that struggles with stuff alexithymia that I’m very, very distant from my own body and everything is happening all up in my head and in my brain and music, for me, allowed me to stim in a way that I didn’t recognise as stimming, that other people found acceptable.
[06:32] So that I to do with the kind of physical act of playing an instrument, so playing the clarinet, but also moving to music. I’m not a dancer. I don’t know how to dance. I’m dyspraxic as well, so it’s all a bit of a nightmare, but I naturally moving, sort of sway, sort of rock, in music. And I cannot stop myself from doing that. I can’t stop myself from doing that in a very noticeable way when I play. But that was completely non-pathologized, because it was understood by most of my music teachers that that was just a sign that I was very engaged, I was completely engaged, completely in the flow state. I was kind of inside the music.
[07:14] So in that way I could completely unmask when I was playing, which was like a huge source of freedom for me but it’s also, on a more basic level, it structures my time, structures my week, it gives me a kind of routine and it gives me a sense of purpose and competency because it’s one of those things that I picked up really quickly and I can just do. Little else in life is like that for me. And it was one of the ways in which actually I could engage in semi-structured social interaction in a way that I could control. So that was also very, very helpful. So it’s all of those things to my life.
[08:07] And another interest that I have really strongly, and it’s started to resurge recently, is in in portraiture. So I have always been really fascinated with facial expressions. I have typically not been fantastic about recognising more ambiguous facial expressions, so I became more and more interested in trying to replicate them using my art and trying to physically work out if I could sift through and atomise everything about the facial expression then suddenly I would understand the holistic whole of it and I would get, ‘Oh, okay’, and I would understand what makes a disgusted expression, for example, so I became increasingly interested in documenting that and documenting that kind of process. Because, again, that is a reflection of the way that I visually see the world, because I see it on a local level rather than a global level.
CB: [09:08] You’ve given us so much there already and I think what strikes me in the way that you’re talking about music and the way that you’re talking about portraiture, the academic literature talks about special interests or intense interests, it often links this with repetitive and restrictive interests and what you’ve just described that strikes as far away from restrictive as you can get, pretty much.
PB: [09:29] Hm, yeah.
CB: [09:30] If we go back to music, you started off by talking about music as being embodied, and an embodied interest and one that you feel and express with the whole of your body. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that in terms of listening to music or in terms of playing music and how that manifests?
PB: [09:50] Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting, and I was having this discussion actually a couple of years ago at a conference with an academic. So they were talking about the process of autistic listening and the sense that we all had that actually there was something qualitatively different about our experience of listening to music to some other people. It’s common to really musical neurotypical people but it can feel really alienating, because when I’m listening to music I can’t be half-listening to music. I am fully engaged with it and I feel almost as if, as I said before, I could step inside it.
[10:36] I really love kind of particularly with minimalist composers. Steve Reich is a very popular composure among autists, because you can sort of sit there and you can keep track of, you know, multiple lines of musical ideas and fade them in and out and manipulate your own kind of musical soundscape, in a way. And just also my experience of kind of reactions to harmony and reactions to particular chords. I remember finding it really difficult when I would go to my parents and play them particular chords and watch them, and you know, they’d think ‘Oh yeah, that sounds nice’ and I was thinking ‘Does that not do things to your entire body? Does that not make you feel enormous feelings? I don’t have the words for the feelings and it makes me feel enormous feelings’, you know, and that can be sometimes really difficult. Because as with lots of other special intense interests, one of the joys is explaining them to other people, bringing them to other people as a kind of gift, and there is disconnect in the way that I experience music, to other people.
[12:00] It can be particularly difficult in terms of when I am doing music with other people as a hobby. I tend to be very task focused about it, and that can sometimes be difficult. Particularly in a kind of amateur music setting, because lots of other people approach it from a social focused perspective, so the important thing is that they are all together and they are having a good social time and they’re making music, but that is not the central focus, but for me the music is the focus. I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be the focus and I can find that really difficult because for me we need to do kind of justice to the music and other people and find that a little bit irritating and a little bit controlling. And so that is the kind of battle that lots of autists I think also have to work around.
[13:02] So yeah, but I do think that there is something to the notion that there is a particular distinct kind of autistic listening process that goes on.
CB: [13:16] It’s really interesting that you say that, because a lot of the things that you’re describing, particularly in terms of the embodiedness of music and listening feel really familiar to me and the intensity with which I feel music and the intensity with which it’s something I want to engage with – particularly listening to music for me, although I do play instruments and I did when I was younger, it’s more in the listening to me. It feels like it requires my full attention and then it does something. I’ve written a little thing recently about going running listening to music, and I can feel the music coming out of my fingers, or I can feel notes between my fingers, and it feels like – you talked about stepping inside the music?
PB: [14:01] Hmm, yeah.
CB: [14:05] I feel like I kind of inhabit the music and it becomes a space that I am part of. And that is incredibly powerful. And I am always surprised when people kind of casually like music-
PB: [14:19] Yes! [laughter]
CB: [14:20] It’s like ‘How?!’ because how can you casually like it? So a lot of that is the sensory engagement that, again, sensory differences and sensory experiences are often associated with autistic lived experience, so this is an interest that kind of pulls in stuff that seems characteristically autistic, would you say?
PB: [14:44] Yeah, yes, I think so. It’s one of those things, I mean I’m listening to music I would say the majority of my waking time, but my hearing is hyper-acute. I can find it really difficult to be in various kinds of noisy environments so when I’m out, listening to music is a way that I can kind of control my sonic environment. So that is a kind of way in which I can manage the fact that I just seem to be again kind of like hyper aware of sound, which can be good and it can be bad. The bad points are kind of being able to hear a pin drop, kind of. Being able to hear the electricity in the walls, kind of thing, and the good stuff is the fact that I have this kind of resource that I can tape in to and be completely transported almost immediately, and that has been kind of lifesaving before.
[15:49] But yeah, you’re right, and it’s really interesting to me talking to other autists because obviously we all like lots of different types of music, all of us, we are all different, but there are a couple of musicians and composers that come up again and again and it’s really interesting to watch performers like Talking Heads and that kind of thing, who clearly also, y’know perhaps would be considered kind of neurodivergent, whatever flavour that comes in. I feel like he experiences music in the same way, and you can see it with various performers.
[16:36] But yeah, it’s interesting, and it is also one of the ways in which I kind of manage the need to sort and categorise. So making playlists, you know, becoming very obsessed with particular composers, that kind of thing, and one of the ways that I like to kind of share music. So I’m a compulsive maker of playlists for other people. You know, whenever I’m in the car with my family, every single journey I will have made a particular playlist. I keep a track in my head of the songs that I’ve played them and the ways in which they have responded to them, so I kind of sort and demote and work things out on that basis.
[17:22] And it drives me mad when they say ‘Oh, I haven’t heard this song before’ and I’m like ‘I can tell you the date that you heard this song!’ [laughter], but it’s really important for me to be able to take this gift to other people and say ‘Look, this made me feel all of these things. I think it will make you feel this as well.’ And sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s very good when that happens.
CB: [17:44] There is so many components to something like music, aren’t there. You can say ‘I’m interested in music’ and that can mean different things to different people, but for you it sounds like all elements of music?
PB: [17:56] Hmm, everything. Yeah [laughter]
CB: [17:57] Yeah, everything about music, from making playlists, that I was making when I was young . making C90 tapes of songs.
PB: [18:10] Yeah, yeah, it’s the same impulse, the mixtape kind of, yeah.
CB: [18:14] Yeah, totally, and I also remember having The Guinness Book of Hit Records and looking at the chart positions of different songs and where they got, and all of those sorts of-
[18:25] And that is a very different kind of aspect of music to what you were talking about with the embodied aspect of music, but it’s still music. You also mentioned Talking Heads. Have you read David Byrne’s book on music?
PB: [18:37] I haven’t. I keep meaning to. Because it’s quite large, so it’s a financial outlay, but I think I will wait until it comes to the university library and then-
CB: [18:49] I listened to it on audiobook recently, because I tend to read better by audiobook, and he talks briefly about being autistic.
PB: [18:57] Oh does he? Oh fantastic.
CB: [18:59] Self-identified. He talks about being autistic, so that is really interesting you should bring David Byrne up as well, and yeah, Talking Heads as an autistic music maybe.
PB: [19:09] Yeah, I mean even the way that he moves is stimmy, rather than dancing. And you can make that distinction.
CB: [19:17] Yeah, absolutely. He talks an awful lot about performance and where the performance comes from and those sorts of things. So it’s a good book. It is quite long, but it’s a good book. And you have also talked, towards the end you were talking about involving other people and also it being a structure for your life. Music provides a structure for your life. Is that in terms of when you say that, do you mean in terms of attending things to perform with other people?
PB: [19:44] Yes, so it tends to be attending groups, orchestras, bands; that kind of thing. Because it’s a way, as I said before, for me to fulfil kind of need to have social contact, but for that to not be completely unstructured. Because I can go to an orchestra and at the beginning be really, really low in energy and have had one of those days in which all of your plans have gone wrong, and then you’ve had to make several phone calls and you’ve got no cognitive reserve, and then I can go to a band and an orchestra and by the end I suddenly have enough to get me through another couple of days.
[20:34] So engaging in the special interest in that kind of way tops up my battery, my social battery, and that allows me then to kind of get a bit further. So yeah, and it is one of those things where I really feel it if I haven’t done it. So during lockdown was a bit of a nightmare because I was doing my masters degree from home and there was no way of doing – you know, I could do instrumental music but there was no way of doing it with other people and it’s not really the kind of chatting in between rehearsals or in the breaks or anything like that, it’s that point where you’re all together as a group or a band and you’re all really listening to each other and you get to a point in which you think actually we’re not just reading the music on the sheet here, we’re trying to make music. And that is a really heady feeling, and something I really, really missed during COVID. And something that I know is necessary and if my impulse is telling me I’m not going to go this week, if I stop doing that I know that’s a red flag for burnout and I need to address it.
CB: [21:52] Okay, and if you were being told by your body, or whatever, to not do that, would you listen to that or do you make yourself go and that makes things better? How do you handle that kind of thing?
PB: [22:07] Mostly I make myself go. Not always, I have to say. Sometimes I just – it depends on the group and the nature of the group and sometimes if it’s a particularly socially oriented group and I’m struggling with the way that they’re approaching the music then I won’t go to that for a while. But it’s one of those things where, it’s a little bit like going to the gym. I will not want to do it, and I will hate the idea of exercise and everything but I never regret it when I’ve done it. It’s one of those things where my body needs it, even though my brain is saying we can’t handle the juice it would need to sort of get there. Once I’ve started then it’s fine.
CB:[22:56] And it sounds like that doing something meaningful around other people is profoundly important, it’s really valuable and it gives you what you need.
PB: [23:05] Yeah, yeah. Well it’s parallel play isn’t it, basically. And it’s one of those things where there is kind of not enough. I think as you get older, as you get into adulthood, social interaction tends to morph into dinner parties and coffee dates and all of this kind of stuff that we tend to find quite difficult and what I far prefer is activity based social interaction where I’m doing something and the other- you know. And music is a really good way of doing that, because if I find that I’ve turned up to rehearsal and I’ve got no battery at all to speak to anyone, in the break I can just play and everyone just thinks ‘Oh, Pip’s just practicing’ so that’s fine.
CB: [23:49] The other thing that you talked about at the beginning was portraiture and so to make the transition between those two topics, is there stuff that’s similar to music? Does it give you similar things in some ways, or is it very different?
PB: [24:01] Yeah, I mean the big, the key similarity for me is this flow state thing. So I can very quickly be in a state of flow when I’m doing music. It’s very easy for me to tape in and out of that and the only other thing that provides that for me is drawing. And I can kind of lose hours at a time, you know, I can let a cup of tea go cold which never, ever happens. And my mother is very similar to that. She’s a ceramicist and four hours can go by and she won’t notice, kind of thing.
[24:41] And it’s one of those things, I think, if I’m getting very – I spend a lot of time in my head as a PhD student and as an autistic person and just concentrating on something that is sort of to do with one sensory modality is really important, whether that’s auditory or visual. I am not a very visual person, generally speaking, but art kind of fulfils that need for me but it has to be done in a very particular way and have a particular process that has always been slightly odd, especially to art teachers! [laughter], so yeah. So I would say it’s the kind of flow state for me that’s the similarity between the two.
CB: [25:35] So you’ve been kind enough to share some of your work and I’ve seen it and looking at it, it looks anything but odd. It’s some wonderful portraits, self-portraits, and portraits of other people and when you sent me these you talked about how some of them are portraits of you, and what you called some of your facial tics.
PB: [25:56] Yeah, so I mean they are much better now but I had a real problem with kind of, I think they were psychogenic anxiety based facial tics, and one of the ways which I could cope with the fact that my body was producing these kind of involuntary movements, which in a way is not like massively different from stimming but for me it had a really qualitatively different feeling. One is joyful and the other is quite frightening. Is to capture them and then to draw them, so I could understand what was happening and understand what other people saw when they saw that happening to me.
[26:40] So I captured them and did a series of self-portraits. I don’t do a lot of self-portraits because I’m like not terribly interested in my own face but that was a kind of way of fixing something down that was kind of frightening to me in its kind of changeability.
CB: [26:57] So that process of drawing yourself, and drawing those facial tics was a way of processing those, of understanding them?
PB: [27:08] I was kind of sort of slightly abstractly interested in the kind of process of ticking and what was actually happening in my brain and how that expressed itself on my face. I didn’t think that actually it would be particularly a useful therapeutic tool, because in the end the thing that needed to be sorted was the anxiety. Now they’re much better because I’m much less anxious. But yes, it was one of those ones where I thought actually this is a way for me to sort through. I tend to do that with problems. I am not very good at just surrendering myself to the emotion of the issue. I tend to sort of think how can I quantify this, how can I sort this out, how can I label this, how can I box this, and then the feelings will come later.
[27:57] So that was a kind of way of me doing that. So, useful, but also you need to sort through the feelings as well.
CB: [28:05] It’s quite analytical, but also creatively analytical, and it strikes me that you’re drawing on something that you love, and that gives you something to help understand something else.
PB: [28:21] It’s quite similar to my approach with the Ekman Faces that I do as well, so Ekman has these theories of universal basic facial expressions. I could go into the debate in the literature surrounding how universal they are and how useful they are as a kind of catalogue, but I kept seeing them again and again in my textbooks and thinking this is really interesting, because I had come across the Baron-Cohen Reading The Mind In The Eyes test. That was one of the early clues because everyone else in my class could do it and I couldn’t.
CB: [28:53] Okay.
PB: [28:57] So my instinct immediately was to draw them. I don’t really know why, it was to produce a kind of series of portraits of these full facial expressions but also just of the eyes, as if by putting them down I could work out what it was that I wasn’t seeing. I didn’t work that out because there isn’t a way of working that out. I mean I did come up with a list of the major muscle groups that move and I could sort of work it out almost by long-hand, but I would never have the Gestalt sense of the expression, and drawing that doesn’t give me that but it did help me to understand why I wasn’t getting the Gestalt impression, because the process for drawing for me, as I said before, is local rather than global.
[29:46] So I don’t produce kind of initial sketches. I find it very difficult to block in large kind of features and groups and shapes, and I tend to work kind of from one pocket of high detail to another, and then the face emerges from that, because that is the way that I see the world. I don’t see the world kind of in global terms. I don’t see the world in gist, I see it in discreet kind of groups of detail. So that became a way in which I could understand my own visual sensory experience, but it was just really interesting to me because I was like we produced this kind of works of art and people would say ‘Yeah, you really caught that expression’, or ‘that is a really interesting expression’ and I was thinking right, well I have just reproduced what was on the photograph there. You know. I didn’t understand that they saw that was somehow something over and above what I could see as groups of features. There is something else. Some other quality of expression that I was producing but not able to see, which I thought was quite interesting.
CB: [30:59] And for others that’s visible in what you’ve produced. And for you it doesn’t feel like it’s there. It’s really interesting, I think that process of going through something creative and producing something and it doesn’t mean the same thing in process as it does in outcome, often. Does it.
PB: [31:16]No.
CB: [31:23] I mean the pictures are wonderful, and what you’ve produced is very appealing to look at and it’s really detailed and you can see that detail in there, but for you it very much sounds like it was also the process of producing it.
PB: [31:35] Yes.
CB: Myself I am really interested in black and white photography and developing my own photographs and all of that kind of business, and I took a series of photos of my hands, thinking about stimming, and I think for me rather than the pictures of my hands, which were very standard pictures of hands doing kind of fiddly things, it was the process of thinking through those that was quite important. I had drawn hands quite a lot I think for similar reasons, because of the kind of sensory stuff around hands, but yeah, that process of going through it. And what was interesting, what you said at the beginning is I’m not really a visual person and I would say the same about me but because would assume, because I’ve done lots of- Because of photography, because of drawing, I had done and those sorts of things, I wouldn’t say I was a visual person either, so could you just reflect back on that. You said you’re not a very visual person but you’ve sent me a load of portraits which are wonderful and we have just spent like 10 minutes talking about portraits so what does that mean? I am not challenging you because I feel the same, but what does that mean?
PB: [32:35] Yeah, no, it’s true. What does that mean for you? Imean other people have said this to me, I think that it’s one of those things where common to a lot of people I have like a very spiky cognitive profile, so I think when I got tested for dyspraxia there was something like 12 standard deviations between my verbal and non-verbal IQ, which is like enormous, because I am a very, very verbal person. Early talker, every reader, I think in terms of words. I think that in terms of speech and sound, erm, very kind of auditory oriented.
[33:14] I find special reasoning really difficult and all of the kind of attendant stuff that goes with that, so if you ask me to reproduce a room that I was really familiar with I just wouldn’t be able to do it, because my visual memory is very bad and my kind of sense of myself in space visually is just very kind of flimsy in contrast to the way that my brain processes language. I know that this is completely opposite for lots of autistic people, so there seems to be loads and loads of people for whom they only sort of think in images, but for me I don’t at all, so it is a bit odd that there is this kind of eyelet of visual ability but, as I said, there is a really striking difference between my ability with portraiture and my ability with landscapes.
[34:12] And I find landscapes really hard, and what I’ve produced is something I am never really happy with because I don’t have a gist sense of the shapes and for me it’s much easier to reproduce the detail for faces. It’s odd. It’s baffling to me. [laughter] But again with music, it’s one of those things where I just picked up a pencil one day and I could just do it and I couldn’t explain to other people why and how. I remember getting really confused with people who were kind of at secondary school art classes, sort of thinking that skin tones were only one colour and I was thinking I can see sort of green and purple, and yellow. I can see all of these other colours, but because I can see them in- I see faces in terms of, as I said, discreet pockets of detail and because it’s almost kind of like a zoom lens, then it doesn’t strike me as odd I would be using green for a face, kind of thing.
[35:18] Yeah, I can’t really explain why it is that I can do this thing but not other special stuff, you know. So I don’t know.
CB: [35:29]I think the visualisation thing is interesting. When I suspected I was autistic I read some stuff by Temple Grandin and Temple Grandin was talking about seeing in pictures and I was like ‘Well, I can’t be autistic then, because I’m the opposite. I can’t see anything in my mind’s-eye’ and so I kind of ruled that out and as you kind of read other things and talk to other people there is this spectrum of kind of visualisation isn’t there.
PB: [35:55] Yes there is, yeah, and I mean in many ways, it’s such a sort of heterogenous way of being, and I think that there’s something to the notion that actually there is many autisms and I wondered actually whether you can make the distinction between sort of hypervision or hyperspatial number oriented autists and those who are hyper lexical and are maybe early talkers, early readers, and much more concerned with words and language because within my kind of group of autistic friends I know both people, both types of people.
CB: [36:39] Yes. Perhaps the final thing I was going to ask you about portraits, related to the ones you sent through. We’ve talked about self-portraits, we’ve talked about Ekman’s emotions, you’ve also said you like drawing LGBTQ+ heroes of yours. So that struck me as kind of another thing that drawing is doing for you. Is there anything you can tell us about that?
PB: [37:02] Yeah, well it’s one of those things where I felt increasingly powerless as a trans person in today’s political environment and I thought actually there are so many lives that are just undocumented, or if they are documented then not enough people kind of know about them and, for me, drawing those icons is a way of actually kind of connecting to people.
[37:38] You can sometimes feel, as a queer person, as a trans person in your family like you’re an alien and you have no roots, no heritage, because you can’t track other people. You’ve got no knowledge of other people in your family and in your ancestry who are like you, so you have to look outside for that and you have to look for kind of your elders and that kind of thing, so that has been a project that I’ve been working on kind of recently because I thought if that’s something, and I thought if it’s something that people want to buy then I can kind of redistribute that money to materially help trans people in need. So that is the kind of notion behind that.
[38:21] So I’ve just done a portrait of Billy Tipton, so I am sort of working out actually how I’m going to translate that in to help for something like Gendered Intelligence or Mermaids. So I am very conscious that you shouldn’t try to monetise all of your things that you can do and are good at, because it is never really a good mix, I think, for special interests. Because of the intense nature, the all-consuming nature of the interests. It’s because it’s very difficult to be pragmatic and flexible, for me anyway, about my interest. And that doesn’t necessarily mesh well with making it a side hustle or whatever the word is, but this is a way I think I could actually feel like I was using the art to do something that wasn’t just for myself.
CB: [39:21] So it’s an identity thing, but it is also a social thing, a cultural thing, it has multiple purposes.
PB: [39:32] Yes.
CB: [39:34] And if we link those multiple purposes to the other multiple purposes we talked about, across talking about portraiture and music, yeah, these interests seem far from restrictive.
PB: [39:43] Hmm, yeah, well it’s interesting because within them there are certainly elements of what you might classically call repetitive, restrictive behaviour. You know, I am very conscious that growing up there were particular pieces and particular composers that I listened to in a way that would be disturbing to neurotypical people! [laugher] but my way of approaching music is expansive and not restrictive and always has been. And actually there is kind of – I don’t know, it’s a little bit like kind of the repetitive and ritual nature of some types of religious engagement.
[40:30] So I think you would struggle to argue that kind of trans based behaviour was restricted and rigid in the way that we talk about autistic behaviour. For lots of people that is actually a route to a kind of transcendental state, almost. And I see that in certain types of engagement with special and intense interests and so yeah, for me I want to kind of reframe the notion of restrictive and repetitive as actually that can also be a positive.
[41:08] Although I am not denying that I am very lucky that my intense interests are very socially acceptable, you know, they are ones that lots of neurotypical people instinctively understand and I’m lucky in that, because I know lots of other people don; have those kinds of special interests and really, really struggle. Because that can be very, very isolating and alienating, because you haven’t got the opportunity to go ‘I know about this thing, and I want to sort of tell you about this!’, you know [laughter], that instinct.
CB: [4141] Yes, it’s easier to find people who are interested in music, isn’t it, even if they are not interested on the same terms, or at the same kind of depth as you, whereas yeah, there is some more specific, I guess, more specialist interests that other people don’t share quite as much.
[41:58] What I think our conversation has shown though is the complexity of these things, and the breadth and depth of them, and like you said – the repetition is there. If you use the methodology that is looking for repetition you will find it but if you are only looking for repetition and restrictiveness then that is all you will find whereas I think opening things up to conversation and looking for more complexity, kind of frames things in a much more expansive and maybe honest way, hopefully.
PB: [42:29] Yes, yeah.
CB: [42:32] Is there anything that you’ve not said that you would like to drop in before we draw our conversation to a close?
PB: No, I don’t think so. I mean there is many more interests that are kind of more transient that also take a lot of my time and my life, you know, so that’s kind of one of those things and I think that there is a conversation to be had about if you get into autistic burnout and the kind of difficulties that you can have if you lose a special interest and how bereft you can feel. But I’m not there at the moment, thank god!
CB: [43:14] That’s good. Here’s to avoiding that burnout and using our interests to kind of help us navigate the world where sometimes things are hard. Okay, lovely to speak to you again, thank you so much for this conversation. Take care.
PB: [43:31] Yeah, you’re very welcome, it was lovely to speak to you.
(end)
Ruling Passions 