When the Way You Love Things Is “Too Much”; or: Why I Went to Portmeirion

As an autistic child, I scrambled to figure out when my passions became too overbearing, too ‘me’ for other people.

The morning after my friend Rachel got married in her English hometown, the Canadian contingent of the wedding party started trading post-wedding UK vacation plans. It was the first time that most of us had ever been able to afford or justify a trip there, and we all seemed determined to visit as many geeky sites as possible. Harry Potter was a common influence. So was Jane Austen.

Even among fellow nerds, though, I hesitated to join in.

My mother and I were one sleep and a nine-hour train journey away from a three night stay in The Village, the perversely charming penal colony where The Prisoner’s Number Six was trapped and tortured after resigning from his secret service job. In real life, this place is actually a genuinely charming resort town in North Wales called Portmeirion, but the distinction is trivial to fans of the 1967 cult hit. Portmeirion is well-maintained but largely unchanged since The Prisoner was filmed there, and I was as desperate to visit as Number Six was to escape it. I fully expected to be overcome with wordless, sobbing joy the second we stepped into the town; the anticipation was making my heart thud even faster than my chronic anxiety usually does. But to the others, I simply muttered, “Mom and I are going to this weird little village in Wales where they shot this weird old show that I’m kind of obsessed with” before attempting to lob the conversation in another direction.

After twenty years of fandom, I still don’t know how to explain my love for a paranoid Cold War thriller about a spy who gets chased around a village by an evil white ball and tortured by a collection of mysterious villains. When I try, I usually end up talking too fast, too long, and generally just being too much. When even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has something to say about the way you love things—describing “highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g, strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interest)”—it’s not easy to figure out how you should handle your obsessions in polite conversation.

As an adult who knows she’s autistic, and who has come to understand the role these habits play in my life, I’ll defend the validity and necessity of so-called “special interests” with the (over)zealous fervor I usually save for shipwrecks and spies. I’m vehemently opposed to any ideology that recommends discouraging them in autistic children—or guiding them toward areas of focus that might make them more employable in the future, as if an autistic person’s curiosity is only valuable if it’s profitable—in an effort to make us appear “less autistic” and thus more palatable to neurotypical people.

I believe special interests have the ability to bring a sense of order and control to a world that is often baffling to us. I appreciate the escapism they provide when things get too overwhelming. And I love the sheer joy people take in them for their own sake—the rush of wonder, fascination, and accomplishment that comes from hurtling down obscure rabbit holes and grabbing hold of every piece of information you can find about something you love.

But this mix of diagnosis, self-awareness, and self-acceptance is one I reached only as an adult. Growing up, I was a nervous child desperately scrambling to figure out the exact moment at which my passions became too overbearing, too off-putting, too me for other people. Adults found my childhood fascinations with the Titanic and dinosaurs amusing and would quiz me about them, which helped bring me out of my shell at school and family events. When I came down with a potentially fatal virus in the first grade, my classmates drew pictures of the Titanic on the get well cards they sent to the hospital. Two years later, the shipwreck was reshaped into an insult hurled at me when they decided they’d prefer me dead. When both my interests and I stopped being so cute, other people stopped indulging and sometimes turned cruel, which left me confused, self-flagellating, and anticipating rejection with my every move.

Indie rock helped me survive my adolescence, land my first writing gig at a Canadian music magazine, and finally find a group of like-minded misfits who accepted me. But I also found it made me even less palatable to everyone outside of that circle. No one else, it seemed, wanted to hear about my work. No one wanted to hear about me. My ideals, then, about self-acceptance and self-awareness aren’t always a match for my history when I try to open my mouth.

*

I have loved The Prisoner for almost twenty years. My first wave of obsession with it and other ’60s spy shows occurred between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, seeing me through a rough transition to high school, three subsequent years of homeschooling, and my start at the music magazine. I first got hooked on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers because Canadian cable stations were airing reruns of both in the mid-’90s. When those ran out, I decided to track down The Prisoner, another weird spy show that my mother had mentioned as a source of childhood nightmares.

U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers had been the cheeky, bubbly escapism that I needed at a time where my world was shrinking faster than my self-esteem and my hope for the future. I fantasized about being as effortlessly cool as the former’s dreamily acerbic Illya Kuryakin—or about being one of the smart girls he sporadically fell for. I wanted to be the latter’s intellectually, physically, and sartorially gifted Emma Peel—or be the smart girl she’d leave her useless husband and hapless colleague for. I already was Number Six, though: unmoored and angry, clinging to the shreds of whatever made me me in a world that didn’t seem to want it. I might not have been a top-ranked spy imprisoned in a surreal seaside prison, but being an undiagnosed autistic wasn’t all that different. I was trapped in a world full of people and rules that didn’t make any sense, while everyone else seemed intent on breaking me down.

And I, too, was my own worst enemy in the end.

The Prisoner made me feel like I was less alone in the universe. It was there to remind me of who I was, for better and worse. It also wound up being a source of bonding with my magazine colleagues, because a certain percentage of music nerds are also obsessed with the show. (Iron Maiden wrote a song about it.)

The spies made a second rescue mission in my early thirties, when I got a little too good at blending into society. The effects of “masking” (as we call it in the autistic community) were starting to erode my physical and mental health. While trying to come up with changes that I could make in my life—ways I could stop investing so much energy into looking “less autistic” for the sake of other people’s comfort—I started rewatching U.N.C.L.E. to prepare for Guy Ritchie’s movie adaptation. I decided to try a little experiment: What would happen if I stopped strictly monitoring how much I allowed myself to talk about my special interests? What if I didn’t spend so much time trying to predict whether I was boring people, and then shutting up or shrinking accordingly? What if I just let people ignore me—or even dislike me!—if they were annoyed by or uninterested in what I had to say?

Embracing my special interest didn’t solve everything. But I was able to take all of that energy I had been wasting on constantly policing myself and my enthusiasm, and put it toward other things. Consequently, I didn’t hate life so much. I even managed to land a dream writing assignment as a result of the U.N.C.L.E. obsession, and made a pair of genuine friends because of that story.

So I kept going with The Avengers and The Prisoner, making no apologies to anyone. And when my friend Rachel told me to start planning for a wedding in England, I decided that adding Portmeirion to my itinerary would be the ultimate celebration of my newfound ethos and lust for atypical life.

*

I didn’t even wait until we made it there to sob; I started tearing up the second I spotted its pastel flourishes peeking out of the lush green countryside from the train. In many ways, Portmeirion was perfect. It was everything I dreamt it would be. It was worth the decades of anticipation, slightly fraught misadventures into semi-remote North Wales, and every cent that I’d invested in it. Hell, it was worth most of the isolation and frustration that had made me the kind of person who would take to a show like The Prisoner and want to visit The Village at all.

I, on the other hand, was weird. Not just in the weird “dress up like Number Six and run around the grounds proclaiming ‘I am not a number! I am a free man!’” way that I’d planned, although I certainly did that, too. Weird in the sense that I started hesitating when I talked about it. Weird in the sense that it took me a day and a half to work up the nerve to wear the white-piped Village-style blazer that I’d purchased for the trip because I was afraid of what people—who were also visiting a place that had an entire store filled with Prisoner merchandise, including the exact same blazers—might think of me. Weird in the sense that the first few drafts of this essay, which I wrote in a Prisoner notebook with a Prisoner pen gleefully purchased from that very store, were self-flagellating affairs about feeling like I didn’t “accomplish enough” on the pilgrimage. I eventually realized that my adventure hadn’t been a culmination of my new unabashed special interest so much as it was a reminder that I was still a work in progress. And then I beat myself up about that, too.

But one of the things that I love about special interests—or at least the way that I experience them—is how they tend to intensify just as you need them to. So as I was stoking my anxiety with concerns about how tedious and unproductive I was being on my dream vacation, eviscerating myself for not being over the need to make the things I love as palatable as possible after all, I was also starting to feel a familiar rush of excitement for Portmeirion itself. Every time I read something about the history of the village (with the aid of the various books on the topic that were available in every room and gift shop on the property), every time we discovered a new trail, curiosity, or dog cemetery on the grounds, this oddball paradise became more interesting.

Four months later, when some friends asked me about Wales, I briefly considered deflecting. Minimizing how much I’d loved it. Instead, I told them about Portmeirion’s founder, Clough Williams-Ellis, and how he’d assembled this place out of off-kilter convictions about architecture and the future of Welsh manors and salvaged pieces of buildings that he had collected across the UK. I mentioned that the front of the building that we stayed in—which happened to be Number Two’s residence on The Prisoner—began its life as a fireplace in Cheshire. I said how grateful I was that one unapologetic eccentric had created this place a hundred years ago, and that another eccentric genius had shown up to film a stylish philosophical fever dream there fifty years ago, so that misfits like me could find our way there today. My friends responded with an enthusiasm so pronounced that even I, a person who still constantly second-guesses her ability to read other people, knew it was genuine.

All of which, I suppose, is my way of saying that there’s this weird little village in Wales. One of my favorite shows was shot there. But that’s only one of the reasons I’m kind of obsessed with it.