“I kept throwing myself at the world and wondering why everything pulled me to pieces.”
Part One of a conversation with Katherine May, author of “Wintering” and “The Electricity of Every Living Thing”
Katherine May1 is the New York Times bestselling author of “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” and “The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home.”
“The Electricity of Every Living Thing” is a memoir of “the year I set off to walk the South West Coast Path2 and learned I was autistic along the way,” Katherine told me. “And that’s definitely the order it happened in.”
This is the first of a two-part interview. Read the second part here. To listen to the complete audio of our conversation, head here, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you get your podcasts. The excerpts below have been condensed significantly and edited for clarity.
ADAM: At the beginning of “The Electricity of Every Living Thing,” you describe driving in your car on a dark November afternoon. You turn on the radio, and you happen to hear this interview that hits you really hard. Can you talk about what happens in that moment, and the impact that it has on you?
KATHERINE: It was actually a really simple moment. It was just a woman being interviewed on the radio and talking about being autistic. It was the first time I’d ever heard a woman talk about being autistic. It was the first time I’d ever had the opportunity to recognize myself because the stuff she was saying felt absolutely like it was me. There was no shadow of doubt in my mind as I heard her.
It really took me by surprise because I studied psychology as part of my degree. I worked in education for nearly all of my career. I’ve worked with autistic students. I thought I knew what autism was. And I realized that I didn’t know what autism was at all. In fact, a lot of what I’d learned had been actively misleading. It just brought about this huge moment of personal revelation, but also this unraveling, this having to unpick what I knew.
ADAM: One of the things that I was struck by as I was reading that, and then thinking about that moment, is just the randomness of happening to overhear that interview.
KATHERINE: I really love those moments of confluence that life brings sometimes. It was what I needed to hear. I was desperate to understand at that point what was going on with me because having a child had really thrown my life upside down and tak[en] me beyond this coping that I’d managed to effect through most of my adult life. So I was looking for the thing that would explain myself to me.
Also, I [had] just begun this process of walking the South West Coast Path. That had cracked me open a little bit as well, having that reflective, contemplative time on my own. That made me more receptive. All of those moments colliding was a really startling pinpoint in time that I could so easily have missed.
In a lot of ways it’s easier to think about how many years I went without knowing. It actually took me thirty-eight whole years to finally come across that message. I mean, I must have missed it loads of times.
ADAM: Early in the book, you write that “as the mother of a young child, the world was never going to give me permission to be on my own, but… I needed it anyway.” Later, while you’re walking, you observe, “There is no sense in feeling guilty at this abundant solitude, in turning back and heading home. I can only go forward. Forward is all I have.”
This theme of solitude—the importance of it, the difficulty of finding it, the guilt at accepting it when it’s there—feels like it runs throughout the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a bit more about how you think about solitude and what you do to find it and preserve it.
KATHERINE: For me, solitude is very, very essential. I really do need time on my own. I need time to process and time to be calm. I need time in silence. I get very exhausted by noise and by chatter and by social interaction—which is not the same as not enjoying them.
It took me a long while to understand that I’m actually quite an introverted person. I had convinced myself that I was really extroverted for some reason, so I kept throwing myself at the world and wondering why everything pulled me to pieces. One of the huge components of learning to live as an autistic person, rather than as a wonky neurotypical person, which is what I used to think I was, has been to give myself permission to embrace solitude.
It’s not an indulgence. It’s an essential part of keeping myself well. There are moments when we really just need to make that space in which we listen to ourselves, hear our inner voice come to the fore, and just be comfortable. Loneliness and solitude are really different things. Solitude is chosen. Solitude is so luxurious. A wonderful luxury.
ADAM: I wanted to ask you about the concept of “disorder,” which shows up in a lot of different ways throughout the book. At one point you write, “Mine is a fragile peace with the everyday world; I can live with it for as long as it doesn’t demand too much of me. Every scrap of noise—and I mean visual noise too, and the noise made by chaos and movement—drains me.”
“Disorder” [is] such a loaded word. Depending on the context, it could mean chaos or overwhelm. But in a different context it implies dysfunction or abnormality or something that’s wrong or broken or in need of fixing. And I feel like this latter definition about brokenness is the one we’re all trained to be hyperaware of. We’re socially conditioned to be on the lookout for disorders. We want to make sure that we can confirm for ourselves and for everybody else that we don’t have one, whatever that means.
One of the places that these two definitions of disorder come together is this expectation that all of us should always be able to handle the chaos of everyday life. [It’s] this sort of default extroversion that you were talking about. And if somebody struggles with that, there’s something wrong with that person, not with the systems or the circumstances or the world around them.
KATHERINE: You have to really know yourself before you can understand the bits of life that you’re actually shrinking away from. I really wrestled with the word “disorder” as I was writing the book because so much of the language around autism uses this term. And I feel very resistant to that because I don’t think we are necessarily disordered; I think we’re often not adapted to the environments that we find ourselves in. That’s probably accelerating in the modern world. Things are getting louder and more chaotic and more eternally switched on and demanding.
There’s another issue with that word “disorder.” I was “disordered” when I was trying to live in a way that resisted my autism and resisted the way that I needed to live in the world. I couldn’t meet my own needs because I didn’t know what they were. I had no way of conceptualizing them or understanding them. And so there’s this really complex relationship with it. I feel like I could write an essay just on this word.
ADAM: I’m wondering what role writing plays for you in making sense of the world or bringing some order to the parts of the world that you find disordered.
KATHERINE: It’s really important. It’s how I understand what I think and feel about things. Like loads of autistic people, I’m quite alexithymic, which means that I don’t always have a big insight into how I feel in the moment. It takes me a while to process most things that go on in my life. I don’t have an immediate response to most things. I often need to go away and have a little think about it before I fully understand what the meaning is for me. Writing is one-hundred percent my toolkit for doing that. It’s the only way I really know how to truly, truly figure stuff out.
ADAM: Near the end of the book, you talk about how walking has become a form of meditation for you. You write, “For the first few hours of a long walk, I’m brimming with new ideas and insights. After that, everything falls blissfully quiet, and I am empty.” Can you unpack that a bit, especially that transition from insights to emptiness?
KATHERINE: Unspoken in that paragraph is that while I was undertaking these walks, I agreed to help out a friend who’s a psychologist researching creativity and how creative minds work. He asked me to check in with a voice message every fifteen minutes or so during my walks.
What I learned was that there was a really clear pattern that was happening [in] three very distinct stages. For the first hour, it was mainly all about discomfort, and I was a bit grumpy and fidgety. Then there would come this phase where I would have what I described as “popcorn brain.” I had all these ideas bubbling up, and they were quite crazy, some of them.
But then there was this later phase, which I think came with exhaustion. Where that took me was into this very silent space where I had no words. I had nothing to say. I’d kind of traveled past verbal communication. It was a very beautiful phase of every walk. I didn’t need to be outputting anymore. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
When I looked back on those moments, I began to realize that they were the points when I had some of my most profound insights. But the insights came in a completely different format. Those are the moments that I came to treasure the most. And those are the bits that are the hardest to find, because they really do take a long time [and] effort to reach. I think they’re the bits that really crack you open.
Read the second part of our conversation here. Visit Katherine’s website to read more of her work and get in touch.
https://katherine-may.co.uk; @_katherine_may_
https://www.southwestcoastpath.org.uk