In Defense of the Intense

I’ve been intense my whole life. Not in a cool, moody, mysterious way – unfortunately – but in the sense that I’ve always been an obsessive person.

The earliest example I can think of is when I was 11-12ish and I was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. When the film The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, a lot of people were blown away by it, but I took it to a whole other level. I absolutely couldn’t stop thinking about it and talking about it. I started a Neopets guild about how hot Frodo was (if you remember the guild frodo.freak or if the username frodo_obsessive_lass rings a bell, hi!) When I wasn’t talking about it, I was drawing and writing about it. I was Aragorn for Halloween. I was convinced I looked like him; I wrote a song about it and everything. I knew every actor’s zodiac sign. I even still remember Elijah Wood’s birthday for some reason. (In my defense, he’s still cool.)

This has been a lifelong pattern. I’m never just “kind of into” anything. It happens less often in adulthood, but every now and then, the right interest will come around and sweep me up. It’s fun, but I can literally feel myself becoming annoying.

I don’t just have a favorite band. I have a band that I can’t stop listening to, thinking about, talking about, and trying to get other people into. I do the exact opposite of gatekeeping. In 2020-2021, I desperately wanted my friends to get into the obscure black metal I was discovering. I wanted them to ride the wave with me. Lately, I’m torn between two stan eras: I’ve been listening to Covenant and Mdou Moctar equally obsessively. I’m so curious to see how my Tidal Wrapped (or whatever they call it) will turn out at the end of the year. Who will come out on top?

If you’re reading this, you probably assume I’m some flavor of neurodivergent and you’re not wrong! In 2022, a therapist I was seeing said, “You know you’re neurodivergent, right?” He refused to elaborate when I asked for more information, so I don’t know which side of the coin I’m on, but I know it’s something.

Obsession shaped my career. If you asked me what my dream job was in elementary school, it would’ve been the same answer as today: I want to be an author. And, well, I am an author! But that’s not my full-time job. (Plot twist, though: my day job also involves writing! I really am living the dream.) My dream job, more accurately, is to be a sponsored writer with a patron. I want a rich person to pay me to sit around and daydream and produce, like, one work a month or something. But that’s just not realistic in the modern day, so I have to work to be my own patron.

Sometimes I go through phases where I’m focusing more on visual arts. Hell, I was doing that last year! But I always come back to writing eventually. In April of this year, when I was feeling especially burned out, I decided I was going to take a solo writing retreat. And here I am, in May, staying in a gorgeous Airbnb in North Georgia! I may be away from my house, but sitting down with my laptop to write feels like a homecoming of sorts. Like the doors have been open this whole time and I just need to walk through them.

When I’m writing, I’m not sure if it’s a flow state I enter into or if it’s some kind of hyperfocus. I can’t just pull it out of nowhere: I have to be hit with a flash of inspiration. Then I need to clear my schedule and just sit there and write for a day, sometimes late into the night. I need to ride the high while I have it. I’m hesitant to call it true hyperfocus because when I have to eat, I eat. When I have to pee, I pee. And, from what I understand, hyperfocus makes it so that you literally forget about your physical needs. I’m currently ignoring mine, but I can’t full-on forget about them.

All I know is that, during those glorious moments, I plunge deep into what I’m working on. I’m capable of superhuman focus. Sometimes I’m playing the same song on repeat, but other times I’m just sitting there in a quiet room, staring at my computer screen and hallucinating for hours. And it feels absolutely incredible. To be getting work done, to really be in the flow of it – it’s the best feeling in the world. It’s a high I’ve been chasing my whole life and that, a few times a year, I get to enjoy.

And when I finish writing something? It’s party time. I blast my music, I drink a celebratory beer (or, lately, N/A beer), I dance around the house, and I give myself a pat on the back. But then, no matter how tired I am, I can’t go to sleep. It feels like an adrenaline rush that refuses to fade. I physically won’t be able to sleep until, like, 2AM. This is fresh in my mind because, well, it literally happened last night / this morning, lol.

It’s precisely the intensity I was born with that allows me to focus so, well, intensely. The obsession I once channeled into being obnoxious about Lord of the Rings, I can now channel into creating literature. It follows me right into the editing and publishing processes. And then, sometimes, people actually buy and read my books! Amazing.

My whole life, I’ve thought I was “too much” for everyone. I worked on it in therapy, but it’s notoriously hard to really dismantle a core belief. The intensity I’m describing here is part of it: I feel like I’m annoying everyone. When I develop a new obsession, I worry people are going to roll their eyes, dismiss me, or even avoid me until it passes. But, the older I get, the less that happens. Why? Because I’ve surrounded myself with people who get it.

I recently apologized to my partner for being obsessive and he genuinely seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. To him, this personality trait is just part of me, the person he loves. He doesn’t feel burdened when I call him to excitedly discuss what I’ve been working on. He doesn’t mind when he gets into my car and I’m listening to Covenant again. He’s taught me that it’s very much possible to be loved for who you are, not in spite of it.

So this is my defense of intensity: It’s not a crime to plunge deep into everything you enjoy. In fact, it’s a really cool personality trait that the right people will appreciate. It’s speculated that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whom I was obsessed with in my 20s, had hypergraphia: once he got writing, he couldn’t stop himself. That’s why his iconic novels feature such incredibly detailed descriptions. Did Fyodor’s contemporaries find him annoying? Maybe. But we know his name; we don’t know theirs.

Be yourself. The world is made up of all kinds of people. There’s nothing wrong with being an obsessive, intense, passionate person who’s loud about their interests – someone capable of all things through the hyperfocus and flow state which strengthens them. The goal isn’t to chill out; the goal is to channel that obsession into productivity. Because, trust me – it feels amazing, it’ll leave you with a sense of accomplishment, and you might even get paid.

Win-win.

Thanks for reading this blog post, which is my way of announcing that a new book is on the way! I’m going to be publishing a collection of short stories soon…including a title you might recognize from 2021. Stay tuned!