in praise of obsession
In the documentary The Pez Outlaw, a small-town Michigan man named Steve Glew makes millions of dollars reselling Pez candy dispensers. The documentary follows his travels to Europe in search of Pez, his eccentric home life, his relationship with his wife, and his eventual fall as he confronts the giants of the Pez industry. More than anything, this is a documentary about obsession. We start in Glew’s basement, where every surface is covered with thousands of flattened cereal boxes he has collected. The cereal box collection leads to a business getting free toys from cereal companies, which leads to a business selling at toy shows, which leads to Glew discovering Pez. Glew’s single-minded devotion to Pez takes him to Europe, where he finds himself at the Pez factory and started a journey that will transform his life. I’m generally impressed by obsession in its various forms. It’s a quality I’m attracted to in friends and collaborators: a flavor of devotion to craft or story or information, a little nerdiness, a willingness to pursue what brings you alive. Watching Glew’s story made me think more deeply about obsession—who is praised for it, how it’s instrumentalized, and whose obsessions are deemed useful and profitable.
Glew’s approach to cereal boxes and Pez reminded me of an autistic person's special interests. Many autistic people develop intense interests in specific topics, to a level that can be seen as overzealous to non-autistic people. These are known as “special interests,” and can make autistic people the target of punishment, social alienation, and derision. As Devon Price writes in Unmasking Autism, children in Applied Behavior Therapy—a punitive form of therapy focused on making autistic children “pass” as neurotypical—”get sprayed in the face with water (or on the tongue with vinegar) for failing to make eye contact, or for talking too much about their special interests.” Autistic people's special interests are coded as weird or creepy in mainstream culture and media, especially if they don’t fall within the range of respectable, monetizable pursuits.
As Glew’s basement makes clear, obsession is about excess. It’s about letting something consume you, being led by your desires and fascinations. It’s about always wanting to know more, understand deeper. It’s about falling down rabbit holes and chasing obscure threads and talking “too much” about something that’s occupying your whole brain. The excess of autistic obsession isn’t flashy or baroque. It usually can’t be displayed as an emblem of wealth or luxury. And it’s worth noting that excess itself is something that’s constantly raced, classed, and manipulated by those in power. Black girl beauty store glamour derided, then repurposed by white influencers and reality stars. The current “stealth wealth” trend of extreme minimalism in skincare, clothing, and design. Interacting with excess from a place of power is about staying ahead of it: knowing—or dictating—when to disavow it, when to embrace it, when to wear a boring $600 turtleneck and call it fashion.
Tastemakers aside, I’ve been learning to heal my own relationship with obsession, and the neurodivergent excess that fuels it. I spent the winter on stationery Youtube, watching flatlays of people showing off sticker hauls, explaining complicated notebook systems, and meticulously writing in expensive planners. I learned about pen history, paper types, Japanese planner companies. I told my friends about what I learned, sometimes sharing things they had no context for and no interest in beyond their care for me.
Growing up homeschooled and largely isolated from my peers, I had a relatively large amount of time to devote to my special interests. However, even I learned there was a point beyond which “smart and curious girl” became weird, rote, undesirable. Collecting model horses and reading pony books was cute, but spouting facts about horse coats and anatomy when asked a simple question was not. As I became a teenager and began plotting an escape route from my home, I spent an increasing amount of time on self-imposed test prep, career planning, and academic assignments. But late at night or in the moments when parental surveillance was temporarily gone, I still cultivated my obsessions: writing prolifically, listening to Tracy Chapman on repeat, reading about ethnography, kink, literary theory.
Looking back at my high school journals now, I miss the person who would write hundreds of pages without giving a thought to audience or finished product. I miss the things that flowed so freely from me then: my anger, my fascinations, my opinions, my urgent attention to my own interior. Rediscovering my capacity for obsession means stealing back what was taken from me by the tyranny of neuronormative standards, academic institutions, immigrant exceptionalism, internalized anti-Blackness, “mature” oldest daughterhood, wage labor, and coerced emotional labor. It means insisting on my right to be wildly, impractically, and excessively involved with something that will bring me no money or clout, that is most of all useless, at least in the ways that are supposed to matter. Because time is scarce, and because we are (variously and unequally) roped into exchanging our time for survival, this is also an impossible practice, for many others more so than me.
In a system which keeps most people in some form of precarity, constantly chasing the security of having their basic needs met, excess is a loaded practice. It implies the existence of non-productive time and space. For many people, excess is a compromise and a negotiation. As a working-class factory laborer, Glew also had to negotiate for his practices of excess. There wasn’t exactly leisure time allotted for machinists to pursue their cereal-box collecting passions. But like any straight, married white man, Glew was able to offload the burdens of his obsessions onto his wife. From the beginning of the documentary, his wife Kathy is presented as a weary, soft-spoken woman. Discussing her husband’s flights of fancy and terrifying financial decisions, she offers canned, indulgent explanations. “Steve is a…dreamer,” she says in one scene. “He’s so much in his head that he doesn’t always pay attention to what someone else is saying or doing.” Cue long-suffering smile. “He was always a good guy, but you had to look for it sometimes.”
I don’t want obsession to only be celebrated in white men tech CEOs or self-made millionaires. I don’t want time to only be available to those who can offload the everyday labor of living onto others. We all deserve the gauche impracticalities of our obsessions—awkward, unfashionable, and unnecessary as they are.
I’ve been listening to:
Skillibeng. Ethel Cain. Myself.
I’ve been reading:
There Are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler, a gorgeous novel about Brazilian communist resistance, roommates who become family, childhood friends with annoying politics, years of Grenfell and Theresa May, weird hookups, queers, and dancing at the club.