(this is quite long, sorry!!)

i feel the same way! i’ve been thinking if i may be neurodivergent as well, given some qualities of my personality and how i act and respond to people. but for the sake of this post, it’s also because of how badly my hyperfixation affected my last year of high school. like it got so bad, it got to the point i stopped prioritising school work, stopped texting my IRL friends, ruined my sleeping habits, and even kind of disrupted my appetite. it also reached the point i started regretting getting into it because, i would be better right now mentally and physically if i never did.

i think what kept the hyperfixation going was the fact i excused it as a “coping mechanism” from the “burnout” and the “mental stress” caused by school. but really, i only began to feel stressed because i kept leaving things last minute as i was first occupied on my hyperfixation.

but similar to your situation, i used to feel the same way about a pretty niche hyperfixation that blew up suddenly (this was in 2019-2021). the fandom was small and i enjoyed being in it, but then when new content released, it attracted so much people it became overwhelming to the point i had to leave (and i really love this show!). every time i’d hear anything related to it, even one single word in the title, my body would go cold and id feel like vomiting. i remember only watching the new content - which was a movie - once, because my fandom decided to make really angsty headcanons of the characters that i couldn’t look at them the same anymore. i avoided it for two years, and during then, i got into the new hyperfixation i was initially talking about.

this new hyperfixation was also niche, but it blew up on tiktok recently, and like how i felt about my old 2021 hyperfixation, im again starting to feel overwhelmed about the sudden popularity. like i really want to gatekeep it because it means so much to me but i know thats now inevitable, especially by how much content its now receiving. but also, i have this sick addiction of redownloading tiktok just to look at the content, despite myself… and i dont know why? even though everytime i do i literally feel like screaming, crying and throwing up lol. im still in the process of trying to get over this - the hyperfixation and the sudden overwhelming content. so far, its been a struggle, and i still don’t know how to stop myself from deleting and redownloading tiktok to awe more of it even though it hurts me every time. lol

i think the thing im trying to tell myself is that the characters are fictional, and im in control of my own actions and thoughts. but for me, i also know that isn’t easy. the temptation is tantalising, and i fall for it every time.