This blog is a little different to my usual posts, but I hope you find it interesting nonetheless!
If you don’t know me, my name is Sam, I am 17 years old, am autistic, have been diagnosed as ADHD and suffer from multiple mental health illnesses.
This week is ‘World Autism Acceptance Week’ and I would like to take you on a quick whistlestop walkthrough of one of my specialist interests and passions that my neurodiversity brings along with it. You might have guessed that the interest I am going to be focusing on is the railways (you are on everythingtrains.co.uk after all!). Without this interest, and others, I simply wouldn’t be me! And these interests are rooted considerably deeper than what might appear on the surface.
Neurodivergent special interests can sometimes be some of the few things that bring that individual a real sense of joy, and excitement and give them a real sense of purpose in a world that might otherwise feel overly daunting to be living in.
This statement is definitely true for me. The interests I have do give me joy and bring a level of excitement that I can only feel about those subjects. Giving my life meaning and purpose is also something my specialist interests are very handy for; without them, my life would be so very different and the days where the world feels too much would almost certainly reach an unbearable level of frequency. That’s a bit of background from my experience of neurodivergent special interests, now let’s get to the more exciting bit!
Anyone who knows me probably knows about my lifelong passion and love of the railways! As a young child my life, or maybe more accurately my whole world, revolved around trains. Pretty much any holiday my parents and I would go on would have some railway link somewhere. I must admit some holidays were purely filled with trains and not really much else (I don’t think my parents enjoyed those quite so much!). Weekends and school holidays would often be spent on train platforms taking photos of trains or doing something railway-related (it didn’t matter how weak the railway connection was)!
Most people I have worked with who have given me an opportunity to properly delve into my ‘train brain’ have probably come away from that conversation thinking either; “that was some really useful information” (usually when I have given them tips to save money on their next train journey!) or “that sounded great, but I don’t understand a word of it”! Either way, I ended up really absorbing myself in what I was talking about and that is such a great feeling. I think less about how I ‘should’ be presenting and the social expectations and instead focus purely on what I care so dearly about. Having people in my life who are willing to listen to me talking about these, sometimes very specific, areas of my interests is so important for me.
Railways are great for my both autistic and ADHD brain! They are fairly predictable; the bigger things don’t change very frequently in the railway world and there’s a thing about the routines and logicality of the railways that my autistic brain loves and craves. Planning train journeys and actually looking at train timetables gives me so much joy! I just love the complicated yet logical (for my brain) nature of the way trains are scheduled!
As much as the railways stay the same, they do change and my ADHD brain loves the thrill of riding or seeing a new type of train or being able to slowly complete my ever-growing collection of railway-related paraphernalia (think timetables, leaflets, train-branded stationery and sometimes even parts of real trains!).
Okay, trains might be delayed and they can seem to be one of the most frustrating things to the British public but to my brain as much as it hates changes to plans, I can find ways to manage it and make them feel slightly more predictable. It can sometimes do that because I am aware of the inner workings of the railway world, so I can predict the disruption and delays before they happen so it doesn’t come as such a huge surprise when they happen. Or I might plan train adventures in such depth that I might have a plan A, B, C & sometimes even D to cater for several different eventualities. These are just a couple of examples.
Granted, these only work in an ideal world and sometimes there are other factors at play on the day of a disrupted train journey, whether that be my mental illness telling my brain something that isn’t at all helpful or that maybe I am trying to process a lot of different unpredicted situations and it can lead to me becoming completely overwhelmed and meltdown. I am not going to sugarcoat it; it can feel like my whole world is imploding and that my lifelong passion is disappearing in front of me. Sometimes that overwhelmed feeling can come before I have even attempted one of my railway adventures and it can take many attempts before I feel able to do what I was planning to do. It’s a battle that I fight frequently but the railways have some kind of pull that always draws me back to them. Whether that be the nothing short of brilliant people that work on the railway or the opportunities that arise that pique my interests or maybe it’s just something about the railways that I might never understand that brings me back to them every time.
If you would like to watch me talk about some of my other interests, including briefly about the railways, then here is a short video I created for Gloucestershire County Council a few weeks ago for ‘Neurodiversity Celebration Week’ (Springtime seems to be a busy time for neurodiversity awareness!).
Leave a Reply