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

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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 New York Times bestselling author of Wintering writes a life-affirming exploration of wild landscapes, what it means to be different and, above all, how we can all learn to make peace with our own unquiet minds . . . 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…

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… As 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, Fake it until you make it’ is a story known by many women with Asperger’s… even the ones who don’t realize they’re on the spectrum. Katherine May, trying to make sense of difficulties, finds herself relating to the diagnosis. But not to the stereotype of Asperger’s, Sure. Yeah. So Wintering is a book, I guess that draws on my kind of lived neurodivergent experience, really, to talk about the times in life when we feel kind of cast out in the cold. So those fallow periods in life, when we feel like, you know, everything else is carrying on around us. And we’ve dropped out, you know, whether that’s through mental or physical illness or through a bereavement, or you know, something like a divorce or a big life change. They’re these times that come to all of us, but we don’t tend to talk about them very much. And so in Wintering, I wanted to really kind of manifest them for the world and shepherd, so everyone that they have this thing in common, and also to talk about some of the gentle ways that you can enjoy them, I think is the best way to put that. People like me can live entire lives wondering why everything is so hard for us. Doctors, teachers and mental health professionals are still routinely unable to spot our autism, and their knowledge is often agonisingly out of date. The invisibility endures. My book, sadly, is very much of the moment.”It’s so liberating, actually. And the big liberation of it is not just that I don’t have to go to the damn party. It’s also that somebody who loves me can see me for what I am, for the first time, because I haven’t always been able to own up to that, without providing an explanation for it, you know? And now I have the explanation. Yeah, this concept of actively accepting sadness is something that really resonates. I know, with many of my listeners, can you talk a little bit more about that, you know, that idea of leaning into pain? Well, not to the sadness, but not fully giving into it in a way that could maybe be harmful?

The book vividly (and humorously) describes battles in a world where Katherine often feels off kilter. And, at a point where she feels she’s lost a sense of identity, she escapes into the wilderness… Undertaking a series of intense, and very calculated hiking trips, allowing herself to bathe in isolation. This series is an adaptation of an original memoir by Katherine May. The story is recreated as an immersive audio drama that details a different way of being in the world—and is a different way of experiencing an audio drama. You can listen either on speakers or by using headphones. Each way of listening provides a different experience. We encourage listeners to try both and settle on the one best for you. A new collection of stories: I Am Not A Label, written by disabled CBBC presenter Cerrie Burnell is intelligent, politically bold and beautiful to browse, says reviewer Kate Lovell Age thirty-eight and feeling every day of it, Katherine May sets out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. Determined to reconnect with her sense of self and rediscover her love of nature, she seeks to understand why everyday life can feel overwhelming and isolating; why sensory environments can become all-consuming and why normality seems to involve social expectations that are exhausting. As she begins her journey, answers begin to unfold—starting with a chance encounter with a voice on the radio that sparks the realisation that she may be autistic. Katherine’s walking becomes a process of both psychological and physical exploration and moments of discovery as she navigates and re-evaluates her life so far.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

Yeah, I mean, because actually, the thing about being a masked autistic person is that you don’t get to just drop that mask, even if you want to, like the masking is so ingrained, it’s very, very hard to get rid of, and you’re not really sure who you’d be without the mask. And, you know, of course, the mask is also a privilege because it allows you to kind of pass in mainstream society. And quite often, I’ve learned that when I drop the mask, like because I felt like it would be the best way to meet my needs, my relationship with the people, I’ve dropped the mask to immediately changes and their tone changes towards me. And that feels very hurtful quite often, I think it’s really important to kind of talk about that as a, as a sort of baseline. I mean, for me, that’s changed the kind of minutiae of my life in a really significant way. And obviously, like, it’s been safest for me to drop the mask around the people I’m closest to, not everyone has reacted really well with that, but loads of people have, and I’m learning how to unmask and to sort of state my needs, you know, and that’s often showing up in really small ways, like being able to say to my husband, this music’s too loud, or you got this film on too loud, and I can’t cope with it, or being able to say, like, I just can’t, I can’t go to this event this afternoon, I’m already feeling overwhelmed, it’s going to completely tipped me over the edge or being able to say, Can we go home now, please, I have reached my limit. And to be able to say that really gently without it being a crisis, you know, because in the past, and like, partly because even I didn’t understand what was going on, I would often have to feel like I had to reach a kind of crisis point, before I got to do the thing that I needed to do, you know, like, I parties, I would get completely just spooked really by all the people of noise and the social demands. And I would end up disappearing off to the bottom of the garden or hiding under the coats, I used to do quite a lot. There was always a room of coats, and I’d kind of bury myself under them and go to sleep or like getting upset, I don’t need to reach those points anymore. Because I’ve dropped my mask. And I began to own up to what I actually need. And that’s, you know, that ‘s it, it takes little learning, it’s surprising, you don’t even recognize what your needs are, first of all. And this year, for the first time, like my dad loves to throw parties and I, instead of me kind of finding an excuse not to go out like saying yes, and then finding the excuse not to go last minute, he said he issued the invitation with the world’s that you might not want to go so it’s okay, if you don’t. And I was like, No, thank you. I don’t want to go. And he was like, Okay, no problem. We’d love to have you there. But we get it. And I just thought Allie Lou Yeah. I felt like finally I began to get the message across in my own very faltering rubbish way. But actually, that isn’t my ideal environment, thank you. And I love to be considered, but I love to be allowed to say no to. Katherine describes her ‘adult self’ as a, “a parrot, a mynah bird”, having learned social nuances from observation. She ‘masks’ so well that, even when trying to seek psychiatric help, she isn’t able to let her guard down,Go to work: grinding guilt at my absence. Stay at home: grinding guilt at my own impatience. I may as well enjoy myself while I’m feeling guilty.” What “masking” is among autistic women and the complications of reconciling with the “mask” after accepting one’s autistic identity Her journey is about discovering where she can compromise, where she can’t, and building upon the relationships that matter to her; she forces herself to hold hands, (something she finds ‘grindingly’ uncomfortable) to support a friend though a cow phobia. She describes her close friends as ‘adoring’, but because of the stigma portraying autistic individuals as perpetually ‘lonely’ she felt she needed to hide her sociability when seeking diagnosis,

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'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.” Someone said to me afterwards, you do know that nobody walks the South West Coast Path in winter, don’t you? And I was like I do now. 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. I loved the voice Katherine gave to autistic women in her book T he Electricity of Every Living Thing and during this conversation, we’ll get into how Katherine navigated her journey of first self-diagnosing and then seeking out an official diagnosis of autism, and what that meant to her. We also discussed how her relationships with others changed, or didn’t, when she shared her diagnosis, the grief that some parents experience when they realize their child is neurodivergent, as well as the importance of “wintering” or actively accepting periods of sadness.