“The world is never going to rush to make it comfortable for you. You really have to figure it out for yourself.”
Part Two of a conversation with Katherine May, author of “Wintering” and “The Electricity of Every Living Thing”
This is the second of a two-part interview with Katherine May.1 Read the first 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: One of the weird things about books is that they freeze the thinking of the author at a very specific point in time. What you believed or what you felt when you finished a book might not be what you feel or believe when the rest of the world actually gets to read it. I’m wondering how your journey has continued, or how your thinking has evolved, since you finished the book.
KATHERINE: I’ve carried on getting more comfortable being autistic. That book is a real insight into the turmoil that it can throw you into when you first realize that you are not what you thought you were.
I’m contacted by a lot of people who are in the middle of the same process. I recognize it over and over again. It’s a huge, uncomfortable, churning mixture of relief and gratitude that you are finally able to have this insight, and wild obsession with all the details of it. But there’s also some really uncomfortable feelings. The sense that you are not fixable. I always thought that I was going to find the right thing to fix me, and I’d be just like normal, I’d be like everybody else, and I would cope.
I’m still often taking to Twitter—I did it this morning—to write down something else I’ve realized about the specific way that I work that is different to everything I’ve been told all through my life.2 It’s a wonderful process of self-unraveling. But it can also be really unsettling and really disturbing. What you learn again and again is the world is never going to rush to make it comfortable for you. You really have to figure it out for yourself. That’s a big project.
ADAM: Could you share the realization that you shared on Twitter?
KATHERINE: This morning I really realized, it really sunk in, that I can only do one thing at once. That’s true on a micro scale—I cannot multi-process. If I’m washing the dishes and someone talks to me, I can’t hear them. I can’t process what they’re saying.
But that’s also a really big thing for me on a macro scale, too, which is that I can only work on one project at once. That is the hard bit because the universe requires me to work on more than one project at once. Because that’s how everything works.
I was a great devourer of productivity books before I got my autism diagnosis because I was always trying to work out how to cope better. Everything always tells you to break things down into chunks, to work on things for short periods of time and then change it up, to have to-do lists or whatever, and to manage your time on a timetable.
None of that works for me because the way that my brain wants to work is it wants to fixate on one project at a time, and when that’s exhausted, I can move on to the next thing. And that is massively problematic for me quite often. But on the other hand, that hyper-focus on things that I am interested in—that is how I write books. I absolutely immerse in them.
ADAM: You mentioned you had been a connoisseur of productivity books. They present such a seductive idea that if you just hack your life just right, you can “do it all,” you can be whoever you want, you can do as much work as you want. I’m curious where you’re at on your productivity journey.
KATHERINE: I think I’m at the exploded phase of my productivity journey. There are loads of really useful things I’ve picked up. The ones that are useful for me are the ones that keep my mind clear. Because I can only think about one thing at once, if I’m keeping something in my mind, however trivial, it blocks everything else out.
I realized that I needed to question more why I was trying to be so productive, and that, actually, I don’t value wall-to-wall productivity in the way that I used to. I’m trying to learn how to resist being busy now. That’s my huge project.
Everything about our society tells us that our value lies in how busy we are because if we’re busy, we’re important. And if we’re important, that means that there’s external evidence that people are valuing us. That’s just not true either. In fact, it can all blur into one big lifespan of rush and hurry and doing stuff for the sake of it. But that becomes very meaningless after a little while.
I do still use productivity hacks that appeal to me, but I use them to make wide-open space and not to fit more in. It’s hard. I find it really hard to resist going back and filling up my diary again. [But] I know the more empty my diary is, the happier I am. I’m pursuing that really hard right now.
ADAM: In the February chapter [of “Wintering”], you write, “Try as I might, I can’t effect the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I can sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside of your normal habits.”
It perfectly articulate[s] the thrill of nature reminding us that we’re not always in control, no matter how hard we try, and that so much of the stuff that we stress out about just doesn’t matter, or the stress itself is very much self-imposed. Could [you] talk a bit more about that and why the disruption of the mundane life, or even snow in particular, affects you like that?
KATHERINE: Snow in particular we’ll start with because it’s just so beautiful and transformative. It is that literal blank slate. Everything gets wiped clean. I remember the thrill of it when I was a child, and I still feel it now—that moment when you wake up and the light has changed behind the curtains and you know it’s snow. You look out of your window, and your garden is unrecognizable. The houses around you are all shrouded in snow. It’s just wonderful.
I love the way it changes people’s behavior as well. People will come and chat to you in the street—who would normally walk straight past you—because you’ve bonded. You have this automatic connection because you’re all having a snow day.
It’s really interesting to revisit the section on “disruption to the mundane” after a pandemic. It’s like, Wow, we have that on a much bigger scale. One of the things the pandemic has done is it has shown loads of us that it’s possible to live in a different way. We’ve had a kind of grand disruption.
We all have different ways that we need to work. And it is a need—it’s not insignificant. That need expresses how well we can cope, how we can maintain good mental and physical health, and how we can do our best work. Those things are all actually very, very important. We’ve spent a long time diminishing and negating them. I think it’s time that we saw it a little bit differently.
ADAM: To wrap up, I wanted to return to the scene with which you open “The Electricity of Every Living Thing,” and this seemingly random radio interview. You stumble across this woman who, as you put it, “describ[es] my own way of seeing the world back to me.” As you were writing the book, or maybe after you’d finished it, were you thinking, My writing might serve as someone else’s woman on the radio?
KATHERINE: In fact, it was exactly what I wanted to do. As soon as I began to understand what was going on and began to look into autism, [I] realize[d] how hard it was to get any stable information about it as a woman. I thought, Well, I want to write the most honest and detailed account of what it is to live inside my head.
Now I have loads of people who write to say, You are my voice on the radio, which is just wonderful. What I like particularly about it is that I don’t have to be the only voice on the radio now that there are so many other people who are writing in this space [and] making art in this space. I mean, we have multiple female autistic stand-up comedians in the UK. Isn’t that wonderful?
People have a far greater chance of finding themselves now, and finding a bit of themselves in my narrative and a bit of themselves in somebody else’s narrative, too. And that’s exactly how it should always have been. It’s now time to broaden that even further so that there’s much more representation for everybody to get that glimpse that is so life affirming and so vital.
https://katherine-may.co.uk
