The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home

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She often puts other people’s happiness first, describing herself as a ‘people pleaser’. But performing for so long has caused her to lose a sense of what her ‘true’ wants and desires are. And, when new stresses arise with the arrival of her son Bert, Katherine feels her coping strategies are stretched, and worsened by tongue-wagging mothers. She fears re-living isolation and rejection as she finds many new situations deeply challenging, Well, I would love to pivot and talk about your new book. And it’s new in the US, I should clarify it, I believe it came out in the UK a couple of years before Wintering did. But as we record this, it’s coming out today, listeners, it’ll be available. It’s called The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home. And I was so pleased to read this book. And I had initially reached out to you and your publishing company about Wintering. But this is the book that I think is really going to connect with so many people who are raising neurodivergent kids and who are discovering their own neural divergence. So can you tell us what that book is about? And why you wrote it?

Now in its third edition, Shy Radicals, written by Hamja Ahsan and published in 2017 by Book Works, is both a criticism of capitalism and colonialism as well as a set of political demands by society’s Introverts. Review by Emily Rueggeberg In August 2015, Katherine May set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. She wanted to understand why she had stopped coping with everyday life; why motherhood had been so overwhelming and isolating, and why the world felt full of inundation and expectations she can't meet. Setting her feet down on the rugged and difficult path by the sea, the answer begins to unfold. It's a chance encounter with a voice on the radio that sparks a realisation that she's autistic. What “masking” is among autistic women and the complications of reconciling with the “mask” after accepting one’s autistic identity Her journey to understand her own atypical mind takes her across 630 miles on England’s South West Coast Path, through pesky rain, cheerful lemon shandies, and interior landscapes that, thank goodness, don’t conform to anyone else’s boundaries.” —Orion Magazine And so begins a trek along the ruggedly beautiful but difficult path by the sea that takes readers through the alternatingly frustrating, funny, and enlightening experience of re-awakening to the world around us…In August 2015, Katherine May set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. She wanted to understand why she had stopped coping with everyday life; why motherhood had been so overwhelming and isolating, and why the world felt full of inundation and expectations she can't meet. Setting her feet down on the rugged and difficult path by the sea, the answer begins to unfold. It's a chance encounter with a voice on the radio that sparks a realisation that she has Asperger's Syndrome. In this powerfully descriptive work, a grueling hike becomes a metaphor for a woman’s experience with Asperger’s syndrome…Candid, rough, and uplifting, this moving account shines.” —Publishers Weekly

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home by Katherine May Underneath that carefully learned set of gestures is raw, boiling chaos. I cling to the right to cover.” The astonishing sensitivity and awareness in her writing, both about the beautiful landscapes and nature around on her walks, and in relation to her family, friends and self put paid to many outdated myths about what it is like to be autistic' Sure. Yeah. So I wrote, I mean, you know, the whole publishing world is quite skewed. So it means that I wrote Electricity about five years ago, and it came out three years ago in the UK. And it’s a book about the year that I set off to walk the South West Coast Path, which is in Devon and Cornwall and Dorset in the UK, and Somerset, sorry. And along the way, I found out that I was autistic. And it’s you know that the book is really about making the connection between the two in lots of ways about sort of walking in nature and going to places that are on the edge lands of, of the world. And exploring being on the edge lands of, of humanity. And the walk opened up space for me to really reflect on what was going on in my life and to see the patterns that had been with me for so long, but which I’d spent a long time telling myself were things that I could overcome. And instead, I sunk into this understanding of myself as a very different kind of a person to what I thought I was. And so yeah, the books now coming out in the US for the first time, which is brilliant, which means it’ll be available in bookstores, which is lovely, because, you know, I’ve got my, I haven’t really had like us readers for it, who’ve managed to get it shipped from the UK. And so it’s so brilliant that this will now be in bookshops, and that, you know, maybe it will open up the opportunity for people to have the revelation that I did, because for adult women, you know, people of my age, I’m 44 hours 38 When I realized that as autistic, no setting nine sorry, I get all the ages wrong all the time. But you know, either way, like I lived a whole life without ever coming across anything that I could have, you know, used to identify. And that meant that I spent a long time feeling like an alien, really. So I’m, I’m really hoping that it will find its way into the hands that need it. I Am Not A Label is an anthology of stories aimed at older children, exploring the lives of 34 “disabled artists, thinkers, athletes and activists fromAs well as being a very raw, truthful portrayal of personal ordeal, it’s also very wry; splicing together funny, and terribly awkward encounters with a very real and consuming desire to walk free and alone. Katherine muses, Katherine began her literary career as a resident writer for Tate Britain's education programme, and until recently ran the Creative Writing programmes at Canterbury Christ Church University. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve been together for more than 20 years, by the time I realized I was autistic. And that’s a long time to feel like you’ve been undercover, I guess. And, you know, hopefully people will discern from the book that he is just a basically decent person. And you know, we love each other very much, which helps not everybody gets that actually, you know, not everyone has that privilege of having someone that loves them for who They are. But when I realized I was autistic I, yeah, I got inside my head about it because I was so worried about telling him specifically and what would he think of me? And what would he think of his situation in that light? You know, like, what? What would it mean for us? And how do you break it to someone after all this time? When it came to it, he knew. I mean, he didn’t know the specifics, but he knew and he’d loved me anyway. And I think that’s kind of what we forget, sometimes we’re so we autistic people spend a lot of time noticing the way that the world has rejected us and the way that world has pushed us away and spat us out and made us feel small, we don’t often turn our attention to how we are loved and how we’re valued. And it turned out that I was loved and valued for me all along, and not for the pretend person I was because he’s the person that seen the real me the most, you can’t mask all the time. And he’d seen me a mask, and he loved me anyway, even when he found me frustrating and difficult. And of course, like what I don’t write about the times when he’s frustrating and difficult, because that would be incredibly rude of me because it’s not his book, and he doesn’t get to speak. So that’s, you know, that’s what love is, it’s not to perfect people coming together and adoring each other unquestioningly for decades. It’s actually like knowing each other’s difficult bits and caring anyway.

All this wonderful diversity is invisible in the winter, but in a couple of months, it will begin again: buds, blossom, and then apples which will fall to reveal naked branches.” Katherine May is a New York Times bestselling author, whose titles include Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times and The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of being autistic. Her fiction includes T he Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club and Burning Out. She is also the editor of The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer and Aeon. She lives in Whitstable, UK with her husband, son, three cats and a dog.

When she described hiding in a quiet corner of the cafe while her husband and son enjoy a busy, noisy science museum, I really wanted to reach out and tell her that's okay--heaven knows I did it often enough! Introversion, sensory sensitivies--those things are real, and what makes me sad is how little help we get in understanding them (I didn't recognize my own sensory sensitivies for what they are until my oldest child got an Asperger's diagnosis and I began to read about it). Poetic and intensely evocative. I read this as a metaphor that she feels elements of her personality retract into hibernation, but then unveil when safe. For me, her most important reflection wasn’t when sight-seeing tall forests and sparkling lakes, but when sliding through wind, rain and mud…

How Katherine defines the active acceptance of sadness and how to lean into our sadness without it becoming harmfulWhen you’re parenting a neurodivergent child, you don’t get to just follow the kind of set pattern that everyone else is following you know, you have to think everything through and you have to learn different skills and different ways to do things. And that’s, you know, that’s a strain like it’s nothing to do with the child. It’s just that when you’re kind of breaking the patterns that are already set. It’s it’s hard. It’s hard work. And it’s you know, that’s it’s valid to find that difficult. This is me right now, crumpled, incoherent, gasping for breath. Flapping my forearms at the elbows like a hyperactive windscreen wiper.” Sadly the stigma of ‘autism’ as an inconvenience to others, instead of a profoundly individual experience, is deeply entrenched. After an initial detoxification of extreme mountaineering, Katherine slows… feeling like she’s missing elements of family life. She’s not seeking isolation, rather space. She begins taking ‘H’ and her son Bert on walking trips. Katherine realizes that she needs the people closest to her to understand the way interactions affect her: In anticipation of her 38th birthday, Katherine May set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. She wanted time alone, in nature, to understand why she had stopped coping with everyday life; why motherhood had been so overwhelming and isolating; and why the world felt full of expectations she couldn’t meet. She was also reeling from a chance encounter with a voice on the radio that sparked her realisation that she might be autistic.