At first glance, my interests seem to cover a wide range of topics—art, literature, psychology, and music, to name a few. But after reading enough anecdotes from autistic women, I realized that everything I find deeply exciting falls into one of two specific categories. One is phenomenology, which involves noticing and analyzing how various experiences feel from the inside, such as whether you think in words or in pictures. The other category is aesthetic tropes, or the sensory elements that accompany a predictable story, such as the characters, setting, and soundtrack of a fairytale.
