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

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In anticipation of her 38th birthday, Katherine May set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. And I, like I was lucky enough to have a family who said, Okay, you do that, and we’ll fit our way around it. 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). If you love this podcast and want to help cover the cost of its production, please consider joining my Patreon campaign.

As in her bestseller Wintering, May’s attention to detail and poetic voice clear a path for readers to pause and reflect.She has powerful sensory reactions to her environment, describing it as ‘electricity’ which pulsates, at points wonderfully consuming… other times far too intense (like screaming at children’s parties… or hand-dryers in toilets). So can you talk a little bit more about your decision to pursue a diagnosis and how you navigated that? Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer and Aeon. As the blurb suggests, May didn't find the diagnosis of Asperger's/ASD distressing, but rather almost liberating.

To be honest, it was, you know, they, they kind of tested me as an eight year old boy, including making me sit in a children’s chair at a tiny table and read a children’s book and explain the story. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is, exactly; something about their noise, their unruly movement, the unpredictable demands they might make on me. 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.Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. We are all a little different in our own ways, and if we can learn to take care of our own needs (even if that means spending half of every weekend out walking), we'll manage better in so many ways. Can you talk about your process about deciding whether or not to get a formal assessment, that’s something you contemplated, you wrote a quote from your book is what happens if my expression of autism is too delicate to be picked up, and I am some I am left somehow estranged, being no longer able to explain myself, because whatever I am, this has been a comfort for the last couple of months, knowing that I might have autism believe it, the more I read has made me feel like I might not be so bad.

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. 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. So it means that I wrote Electricity about five years ago, and it came out three years ago in the UK. It feels as though I have two different selves; a desperate, animal self, emerging in chaos, and a calm, wise human, squinting to recognize her twin. I don’t think we have those conversations very much in the mainstream, you know, I don’t think we often allow the possibility that there are some parts of life that will come to us, and they are negative, and they’re unavoidable.

Sadly the stigma of ‘autism’ as an inconvenience to others, instead of a profoundly individual experience, is deeply entrenched. Something Shady at Sunshine Haven (The Accidental Detective) by Kris Bock About Something Shady at Sunshine Haven Something Shady at Sunshine Haven (The Accidental Detective) Cozy Mystery, 1st in Series Setting Arizona Tule Publishing (April 7, 2022) Paperback ‏ : ‎ 324 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 195489449X ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1954894495 Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B097WJYYBZ Publisher's Blurb : She’s pursued the most dangerous news stories around the world.