Britain in moderation

Uprooting your life for a special interest is wasted on the young.

I held an annual membership to a club that played behind closed doors. When the pandemic shut borders and stadium gates (and before I knew I was autistic), I was forced to put one of my most over-the-top special interests on hold. Just a few months prior, my obsession with London had bubbled over into a fandom of Tottenham Hotspur. I picked this team after Rob Delaney mentioned them in Catastrophe (also set in London). Seeing their passionate crowd on NBC Sports one afternoon, I thought they’d make a perfect ancillary activity for my next trip across the pond. I bought a plane ticket, a club membership (a prereq for…), and a game ticket a few days later. By the time my navy and lilywhite scarf came in the mail later that fall, I had already spent a crisp afternoon in North London.

I chose to open my discussion of special interests with the Spurs and London because this particular interest still intrigues me. I didn’t even label it as a special interest until recently when I asked my therapist if it counted and they nodded with a subtle smirk. It remains a laughably concrete example of my brain latching onto something and me acting immediately, with a depth I don’t often encounter in others.

In elementary school, my best friend at the time asked my parents what I was obsessed with at the moment. My friend was likely referring to how I had been pestering them to make another book about Titanic with me. I made a lot of “books,” meaning I drew pictures on a sheet of folded 8.5x11 inch printer paper. I didn’t particularly care about the drawings, but I would certainly be upset at you if you put less than four smokestacks on your ship. And I would not fail to point this out when I asked my parents whose book was better. (mine, duh!) When they showed us at school a website called Yahooligans! (or Yahoo! for kids), the first thing I did was google (err…yahooligan) for pictures of Titanic. It had them, four smokestacks in all.

As I acquired more skills, my special interests migrated from printer paper onto the world wide web. I thought it was normal that if I liked stadiums, I should make a website about it. I had a few years of software tinkering under my belt, so this wasn’t a Geocities website with a couple of images and a visitor counter. This was a full-on LAMP stack social network wannabe, inspired by the dominant web property of the day, The Facebook. You could add friends and see who among them had been to the most stadiums (of the subset of stadiums I had entered into the database manually). I went on a bus trip to a few of these stadiums and people knew to ask me when they wanted to know a stadium’s capacity. I was happy to answer, but it confused me why someone would go to a new stadium without knowing its capacity (at least within the nearest thousand—I’m not a robot!).

Membership on my social network plateaued at 150, which felt pretty good considering I only knew about half of them. I had a few entrepreneur friends who were supportive, but it was still a confusing wake-up call when I had a call with a stadium advertising company after seeing their ad in a stadium bathroom. The rep gave me a quote in the tens of thousands and I politely declined because I didn’t have “sufficient capital.” Shortly afterwards, I had a meeting with members of the entrepreneur office on my college campus and it was similarly positive yet awkward. I believe they expected me to ask for money or generally describe my vision, while I was confused why we were talking at all if they didn’t like stadiums or at least have a website about something.

I’m deliberately describing myself as more obtuse than I was. However, my feeling of excitement about my ambition bearing the fruit of new connections being tempered by confusion over not being on the same page as the people I was meeting was real and persists to this day.

After plateauing on the internet, my next special interest would reshape my career. Public transportation was too important a topic not to! By this point I could begin to see a pattern:

1. I’d have an inkling of an interest: “Subways are cool!”

2. I’d have some history of acting on my interest: “Let’s ride the subway one stop while we are in town!”

3. A social situation would shine light on my budding interest: “You talked about buses?! How unusual!”

4. I felt seen by my new social recognition of my special interest: “Let’s ride all the buses in town!”

Recognizing this pattern did not make my interest feel any less real and may have even amplified it. Barely three years after I went through this process with public transportation, I moved across the country to make it my career. I didn’t feel seen in my previous job, so the obvious solution was to act on the thing that felt uniquely mine. This decision played out over an arc of 9 years and ultimately led to my autism diagnosis and decision to be self-employed. I have no regrets because this made my life richer and led me to meet my partner, but I’d still like to take some wisdom from the experience.

The title of this essay is a silly phrase which serves as a reminder to myself: don’t move to the UK because of your special interest in London. I’ve had enough life experiences to see how much my ambition and special interests can combine to uproot my entire life. I have already attended a Tottenham game in person. I have participated in an on-site interview a stone’s throw from Blackfriars Bridge. And I have had subscriptions (real or trial) to the Economist, the Telegraph, the Times, Financial Times, and the New Statesman. (Could journalism be another special interest? Yes. It 1000% is.) And don’t get me started on their rowhouses, transportation network, or THE CLOUDY DAYS. If those aren’t a reason to move somewhere, what is?!

I started the last paragraph articulating how I made peace with Britain in moderation as the right policy for me and I ended it about to drop 100k quid on a terrace house in need of fixing up in Sunderland. I can intellectualize my interest all day long but ultimately it’s a feeling. Some wanderlust, some human vibration that resonates deep within my soul. It’s comforting to know that my brain’s wiring explains this to some extent. Yet the pull toward the damp pavement of a street lined with sandstone brick tri-levels persists. The challenge now is to honor that part of myself while staying present in my life as it is: a 30-something autistic person with a contented life here, even as Britain stays on the brain, tugging at the edges of my thoughts.

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Elsewhere

In addition to my writing here, I also mentor software engineers in a fun and supportive environment.

• Declarative macro magic from Axum in Rust - From Scratch Code