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beautiful landscapes and nature around on her walks, and in relation to her family, friends and self put paid to many outdated myths about what it is like to be autistic'

How Katherine defines the active acceptance of sadness and how to lean into our sadness without it becoming harmful 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. Easy to devour, an incredibly raw and heartfelt story of one woman’s wondrous journey of self-discovery.” —Porchlight 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. 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,

Yeah, I mean, so powerful and, and certainly, so you said you were 39. So this has been, you know, maybe five or six years ago that you went through this, this process. And I do think that things have changed, I certainly read more and more about self identification really, especially among women being really the primary way that people are identifying as autistic. I’m just wondering, you know, for listeners who might be in the same space, and they’re kind of connecting some dots for themselves, what thoughts do you have for them about whether or not it’s worth pursuing, or, or maybe what having that identification has meant for you and what you’ve seen it mean for other women? An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. 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.

We’re not an evolutionary accident, but an adaptation. We are not what you think we are. We are useful, valued, loved. We’re the scientists and artists, the dreamers and the engineers. We’re vital to all of it. We’ve been pushing it forward and holding it together while the extroverts take all the glory.” 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.”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).

So she isn’t taken seriously. She describes herself as astutely ‘well-adjusted’…. but realizes it was humiliating and often isolating childhood experiences, which shaped her, What “masking” is among autistic women and the complications of reconciling with the “mask” after accepting one’s autistic identity

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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,

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.” 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 from 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. 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. My son demands Mr. Whippy over artisan ice-cream. He spills things. I get raggedly bad-tempered. I scold him for sloshing milk over the table… in the process tipping the whole glass over myself.”

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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… 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. 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, To say I recognize myself in Katherine May would be an exaggeration, but there were undeniably points in this book where I found myself saying "But wait, that's not weird. I do that." And I, too, have turned to walking to deal with things that seem impossible to deal with. So I was very ready to find out how walking worked for May, and how she coped, in the end, with her diagnosis and the new reality that created (and maybe if she got any brilliant insights or healing from the walking).