One of the major characteristics of my personality is curiosity.
What I am realising more and more is that what I call curiosity is driven by autistic obsession with topics that bring me joy.
Sometimes it is the topic that brings me joy and other times it is learning everything I can about that topic that encourages the persistent interest. The learning part.
There are fascinations I have that are fleeting. Usually I hear a fact (often based on some piece of data) that grabs me and then I deep dive into the topic to the point that I could go on Hard Quiz with it as my specialism.
An example of this is when I heard that approximately half the world’s pigs live in China.
First, I couldn’t fully comprehend it so I wasn’t sure to believe it. But it was on an SBS-made show so I thought it must be true. Then I spent an hour finding out that stat is true and then reading all about the pork industry in China. 13 billion pigs is a big number. That is around 9 pigs per person in China. Or 1.6 pigs per person on earth. And that is just half the pigs on Earth.
It goes on and on until I find another fact that I follow like a beagle.
Then there are the ongoing interests that people know I am into. The ones where all my friends and family find themselves knowing a lot of facts about sharks, mammoth haemoglobin and meth amphetamines.
The science interests me more than anything. How does it work and why?
When I was in my twenties, I tried to temper my thirst for learning a bit about everything because I saw people’s eyes glaze over when I was excited and overstimulated while sharing that knowledge.
As I matured, I just got rid of the glazed eye people and found people who were interested in Damana’s current interest. This made me a lot happier. This quenched the thirst.
You could be obsessed with much more destructive things than a need to tell people that sharks existed before fire on this planet.
Damana Madden 