Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with author Katherine May. 28/02/2024

Introduction

Elizabeth

Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the deep values of the people who shape our common life. I’m driven by a deep curiosity about what is beneath the surface of these public figures. How do they make meaning? How do they make decisions? What is the thread that they’re following where they’re trying to use their skills and talents professionally? What do they believe about themselves? What do they believe about other people and about what a good life is, even what might be beyond this life? And I speak to people from all different political and metaphysical and professional perspectives. So if you’re looking for a podcast where you’ll only hear people that you already like and respect or who are a bit like you, then this is not the place for you. 

I would invite you to start if you’re a new lister with the people that you already feel interested to talk to people whose names you might recognise or whose identities you have something in common with. But I hope over time, you will also listen to people from different perspectives, different life experiences, different values. I believe and I’m in a more soapboxy manifesto mood today, I believe that this listening across differences, this seeking to understand this curiosity about people not like ourselves is a really important practice. For me, it’s a spiritual practice. If that language doesn’t work for you, then you can call it a citizenship practice. You could just think of it as a human practice of something that is good for us. I think like most things that are actually good for us, they also can be beautiful and joyful and enjoyable. This podcast is not homework. It should feel like an adventure.

Today’s adventure is in the company of Katherine May. She is a writer, she has written several published books, beginning with novels and then moving into nonfiction and memoir. And she is perhaps best known for her internationally best selling book, Wintering, which is about the season of winter, but also the seasons in our lives of rest and retreat, of difficulty and struggle of stripping back. And it was published during the 2020 pandemic and struck a chord with a lot of people. And her most recent book is called Enchantment about finding awe and wonder in the everyday and that’s about to come out in paperback. We spoke about both those themes but also about solitude and class and what it means for her to be an artistic person and the weirdness of the millions of people that now look to her for wisdom and the strangeness of all these people on YouTube and who’ve written books who perhaps, you know, in other decades or other centuries religious leaders would have been where people went for wisdom. And now in some cases, it’s people like Katherine. What do you do with that? How do you live it? Well, we had a lovely, lovely conversation. I really enjoyed it. I’m going to hand it over to you, but there are some reflections from me at the end, so check back in afterwards.

Katherine, we are going to do that very un–British thing, which is no small talk, although we have already talked about the weather because it’s obligatory. 

Even me who can’t do small talk, and is unapologetically earnest and always wants to do depth, it’s a reflex, I can’t help it. We’re going to move past the fact that it’s grey today. I would love to give you a moment to reflect on what is sacred to you. And guests can take that in any direction that they want, you can challenge the premise, you can push back. But if it’s helpful to have some guardrails, I started this project trying to understand what people’s deep value and principles are. We sometimes get a clue to what is sacred to us when it’s transgressed or when we feel like we’re being pushed to compromise on something. But I just find it a generative thing to ponder on, rather than something that we’re going to have a definitive or clean answer to. So as someone who is very thoughtful about words and things in this area, and what bubbles up when I say, what’s sacred to you?

What’s sacred to you? Katherine May responds

Katherine May

It’s a lovely question, and I think the first thing that popped into my mind was the word solitude, which is such an important component of my life, but one that so often is very hard to access or achieve, and one that it sometimes feels challenging to demand, actually. It almost feels transgressive to say, I need loads of solitude in order to function. What I have realised in the last couple of years, because I always had these concerns that my desire for solitude was very selfish and about getting me time and rejecting everybody else, but actually, in my moments of solitude, that’s almost how I increase my connections with the world around me. I’m contemplating all my points of contact over the last few days, all my relationships, all the important people to me. I feel like I’m strengthening those bonds while I’m alone rather than rejecting them. I come back a better person, more able to be a positive social presence rather than someone that that’s desperate to escape. I think solitude is so sacred to me, it’s a way of communing with something far bigger than I am, which is one of the ways that we can think about the sacred.

Elizabeth 

I really resist computer or machine metaphors for human beings. But I went immediately to like defragging your hard drive or something, like processing the input or something. I was like, no, I don’t love that. But it’s something around what happens when we dream, we have all these inputs during the day, and then our conscious and unconscious sorts of orders and reconnects. That’s such a vital part of then going back into the day, and it feels like solitude may be playing that kind of role for you.

Katherine May 

I’m going to return your computer metaphor, with a phrase that my husband told me a few years ago. When our computer starts to run slow, rather than backing off, you press every single button on it all at once, until it goes, BEEP! What that beep specifically means is that the computer’s events buffer is full, that has this thing called an events buffer, which means it can only take in a certain number of events of inputs before it starts going, no more! My events buffer gets full and solitude lets me gradually work my way through all the things lined up in that buffer till I stop beeping. 

Elizabeth 

That would be so helpful if we could just weave that into normal social discourse, right? Like beep! And everyone backs off. Have there been times in your life, where that sacred core of solitude, you’ve had to make hard decisions to honour it? Or maybe you’ve made hard decisions and haven’t honoured them, and that was equally significant in your life story.

Katherine May 

I think in early motherhood, I lost my solitude. And the book that I wrote was about this kind of moment when I realised I needed to take a series of really long walks. I couldn’t even articulate why I wanted to do that, at the time. I really didn’t have anything other than, I just need to walk. Once I started walking, it was so hard physically and mentally to do it, like I only really got going in the autumn. I went back to the southwest coast path once a month to try and make progress along the path. I was walking through the most foul weather you can imagine. I was hailed on, I was constantly rained on, there was so much mud, I fell over so many times. I was unfit as well, I found it physically very, very difficult to do. I walked with a lot of guilt as well for leaving my three year old with my husband while I did it, and for not wanting to be there all the time and for not wanting to be the ever present mother. I just needed it, I knew I was going to break without it. To stretch the events buffer metaphor far too far, it took me six months of working to empty that buffer, and to actually get some clarity again about what was happening in my life.

It was really the moment that I learned how much I need to not only be alone, but to move while I’m being alone, not to not to be alone sitting still. The physical movement really is part of that and in a very meditative way, in a way that lets me keep going, that lets me keep being alone. I need to get my legs tired to release my brain to think about something other than the path. I need to reach this state of exhaustion before I get into a very particular state of mind that feels like I’m beginning to really connect with the things that are in there.

Elizabeth 

It sounds almost like a kind of pilgrimage to yourself or pilgrimage to your inner world underneath the noise.

Katherine May

I think this idea of pilgrimage is really rising up in our culture at the moment, I think we’re really reconnecting with what it means to move through a landscape with a with a kind of spiritual purpose. Maybe we’ve overused the word journey too much in storytelling, but the journeys we take are meaningful, and they’re meaningful, not because of meaning we give them before we start the journey, but we will always find something in the progress of that walk, even if it’s boredom, even if it’s through sheer boredom that we’ll do something else. I think boredom is a really important part of pilgrimage. I wonder if there’s like a cycle that we should all honour of pilgrimage every like seven years or so feels about right to me.

Elizabeth 

There’s so much I want to come back to you and what you said. But I have a tradition of trying to take the listener back to the early years of our guests to kind of locate you in the beginning of your story. I particularly love to hear any big ideas that were in the air probably implicitly, rather than explicitly, although that’s not true of everyone’s childhood. Philosophical, political, religious. What was your world like?

Growing up: searching for answers and noticing class difference

Katherine May

I actually think it was probably an absence of all of those things in lots of ways. My mother’s a devout atheist, but not in a particularly philosophical way, just that she just doesn’t like any of it. I always went to Christian schools, funnily enough, and so I had a lot of contact with religion, but from a household that definitely wasn’t part of it. I just don’t come from a very intellectual background at all. I think what was formative for me was feeling like, I wanted to think about a lot of different things quite conceptually, I was really interested in ideas and debates around big questions. I felt there was no one in my life that I could share that with them, I felt quite odd for wanting those things. One of my very earliest memories is going to visit a friend of my mum’s and being told she had a little boy the same age as me, I think I must have been three. I remember having the thought, maybe they’re going to tell me where the sun goes at the end of the day. I look back at that, and I remember this trip seeming really magical to me, because I thought they were going to I decided they were going to tell me and of course, funnily enough, they didn’t. I think my mother could have told me if I’d have asked, but I remember wanting so much from the world, wanting all of this fascinating stuff to come to me, I often wonder what life would have been like for me with the internet now that that endless possibility. I think we forget what a magical space the internet is, as well as a really difficult and oppressive space, that the sheer possibility of finding out whatever you wanted to know, that exists now, that just did not exist at the time. 

Elizabeth 

This may not be a frame that kind of sits right or is helpful, in which case, feel free to bat it back. One of the things I often talk about with gases is divides and differences and how we can build empathy and curiosity across them. I think, certainly, in recent years, we’ve spoken about lots of those differences and coming to understand each other more deeply, but of that list of possible ways we can conceive of ourselves, class is one of the ones that’s quieter. Given how weirdly baked in to the British psyche it is, it’s not spoken about. Does that make sense to you?

Katherine May 

I see a lot of things through the lens of class. Coming from a working–class background, being the first generation of my family to go to university, and even entering the workplace, and not understanding the shape of things. Still not really understanding how my life was now supposed to work now that I’d crossed this threshold that the rest of my family hadn’t. We still feel so awkward talking about class, it comes with talking about money as well, which we absolutely hate talking about being British.

I would love to have more of a conversation about that, partly to kind of assert some of the amazing values that I grew up with, that I don’t see existing quite so much in the middle class families that I now know. The absolute commitment to looking after all of the people in your family, however they’re doing at the time, and to looking after the people around, really taking responsibility for other people’s children’s and other people’s elderly parents as well, which is really quite common where I come from. I think they’re really amazing values that we could, that a lot of people could learn from working class people and without a doubt. I’m also really deeply interested in how kids like me, who look very odd within those communities and who can’t not look hard within those communities. What can we do to help them to have the kind of rich cultural experience that middle class kids just get as standard? I still feel like I’m playing catch up with such a lot of things. There was no access to so many things in my background, we could not have afforded to go to the theatre. We could have afford it to buy books, all of these experiences that are part of the makeup of educated people are things that just would not have been possible in my world. Having watched the way that arts are funded over the last 20 or 30 years, we are drawing back from a position where we’re inviting kids into those spaces. It’s a conversation that urgently needs to happen. It’s safe, it’s okay, we can have different backgrounds and everyone can come to the table, it doesn’t have to be a top down conversation. 

Elizabeth

This feeling that any of these any of these ways in which we’re different, and we fear getting it wrong, or being judged or being exposed, it raises our fight or flight. Then we can get tense and clenched, and then we can’t actually meet each other across our differences with grace and curiosity. But the practice of being like, tell me about your work, tell me about your story. It’s a practice of being a citizen, of being people who do have a common life and cannot withdraw from it. 

Katherine May 

We lack the kind of social structures that would wants thrown us all together into one big bucket. Funnily enough, church is definitely one of them. This came to mind for me a couple of years ago, when I was working with a colleague who would have self–defined as posh, right, like proper signet ring, from

very privileged background. I noticed one day that she was absolutely best friends with one of the women that cleaned the university. It was so incongruous, like how do you to know each other. She was like, we go to church together, and we know each other really well because of that. And there was obviously a real closeness between them. That was a real moment of pause for me thinking, we are we are really missing out on social situations where you have to accept everyone, you can’t socially exclude people because you don’t like them very much, or they’re a bit annoying, or they don’t look much like you. That’s a skill set we’ve really lost and I think that’s part of the pain that we’re feeling right now. We need the edges knocked off us, to give you a very working class phrase. I think we’ve all got a few edges that we could do with sanding down a bit at the moment. 

Elizabeth

I’ve been writing this week about congregations and community and both the pain of them and the very intense discomfort of them. I think a lot of congregations are feeling that particularly at the moment in the UK. But there’s very few other settings where you have this scaffolding for community, there’s something that you can join rather than you having to constantly decide and constantly self–create. So that sort of scaffolding for community and also you have the why, which is even when it’s hard and it’s horrible. In the case of my tradition, like we are one body and we’re called to love one another, like get over yourself. 

I’m going to put a really big pin in that because one of the things I want to talk to you about is the role of spirituality in your work. I would call myself spiritual and religious. I think there’s loads of interesting things going on in that atmosphere at the moment. First, I just want to just fill in a few bits of your journey. So we have heard about your childhood the barriers really to accessing culture that might have been easier for other kids. What was the thread you were able to pull on to follow that love of words and books and curiosity to get to be a writer? 

A dictionary and a teacher: the writing journey 

Katherine May

I was always a writer more than a reader, which is kind of unusual actually, when I talk to other writers, they always say that they were a bookworm. I read but I didn’t have a plethora of books available. What I did have though, was the dictionary that had been given to me when I was born by my aunt, and I read that over and over again, back to front, sideways, around and around. It was it was this book that I found endless fascination in, it was bottomless as far as I was concerned, because once you learned all the words, you could start comparing the meaning of the words and looking at their etymology and thinking about the languages that they were linked to. I found that so exciting, which I realized people don’t relate to. I still have got that dictionary, the cover is flapping off of it. 

My mum was very canny in sending me to really great schools. So I went to a tiny country primary school and then to a grammar school, because in Kent, we still have the 11+ system. I am uncomfortable with a lot of aspects of it but I have to say, hand on heart, that I was so lucky to be at the school that I ended up in, because it pushed me so hard, all of the time, to keep expanding my understanding of the world. I’ve worked in education for most of my career and one of my criticisms of the way that education is changing and has changed since I was at school, is that I don’t think we’re pushing kids to go deeper anymore. I think we’re pushing kids to go along the surface and work harder without understanding why they’re working hard without developing really complex ways of thinking. I think that’s tragic. I think kids are cracking under the strain of it. I felt like my grammar school pushed me hard, but it was nothing like that. There always was someone to challenge every assumption and to say, have you read this? It allowed me to get into a good university. 

But I also had a Gran who read a lot. She didn’t read anything very fancy. In fact, there were carrier bags of romance novels that got passed between all the older ladies in the village, and they just read anything. I think seeing someone sit down and read every day set a little pattern in my mind of what my afternoon might look like. I was really lucky to have that. 

Elizabeth

When did you think, I am, or I could, be a writer, this could be my thing? 

Katherine May 

I thought it when I was really young, actually. I think I was probably about 10 when I started being really serious about writing poems, and had this amazing primary school teacher who was previously a secondary English teacher. She really worked with me on my writing and she was a great model as well, because she wrote the school play every year. I was watching another writer in action all the time. And she just took me seriously and that’s all you need. You need someone to tell you you’re not stupid. I remember her at a school open day, she put her hand on my shoulder and said, this is Katherine and she’s going to Oxbridge. I had absolutely no idea what Oxbridge was. But you’re damn right, I was going to do it. You just need someone that really invests in you in that way. It’s a tiny amount of investment, but it’s like, I see you. You’re good. I’m going to point you the right way. 

I just started telling everyone as a writer. It’s cute at first but by the time you’re 14, it becomes a lot less cute and people think you’re crazy and a bit weird. There was a point in my teens when I decided to stop writing because I suddenly had this horrible sense that I was embarrassing myself and that it was actually not a worthy ambition, that it was a silly ambition and that I was overshooting. I gave up completely until my mid 20s. I think I still thought I was a writer the whole time secretly, if I’m not sure if I ever quite let go of it. I found out a couple of years ago that my mum saved all my notebooks in the loft. If anyone asked, I was like, no, I’m not a writer anymore. I decided at that point, I would be Prime Minister. 

Elizabeth 

That would be a whole different conversation and I sort of love it for you. What brought you back? 

Katherine May

I realised Prime Minister looked really like a horrible job, actually. I left university and hadn’t really loved it. As I was sitting on the train, commuting to my first job, I hated working for other people. I couldn’t stop wanting to write about it. I just kept thinking about the story I’d tell about, about commuting, and like the people doing it and what it was doing to them, and kept telling myself, no, no, no. Eventually, I left that job and became a school teacher. I did the on the job qualification that you could do. As I was finishing that qualification, my assessor told me, I passed, congratulations. And then said, what are you going to do next? I was like, I’m going to go to the pub, and I’m going to drink like, clear spirits for about five hours and then fall over. He was like, no, not tonight. He said you’ve been in the habit of learning for about 20 years solid now. You shouldn’t give up, you have that pattern that you’re following that you know how to study. If you stop now, you’re going to break that and you won’t go back to it. So you have to find the next thing to study after this qualification. I thought about it, and I decided to do a writing correspondence course. 

Elizabeth 

Wow, what a fabulous, prophetic, pastoral thing to speak over you.

Katherine May 

It was one of those gifts again, it wasn’t a huge gift, but it was just it saw what I was and what I’d always done and said, like this is what you do next.

Elizabeth

And then you published some novels. And latterly nonfiction and these beautiful hybrid sort of memoir, wisdom, reflective, un–genreable books. I’m always interested in how people think of their vocation. I guess the short form is, what are you trying to do when you write what is? How do you conceive of the way you use your work? Where are you trying to point yourself towards?

Katherine May 

It’s a hard question, but it’s a hard question that I’ve thought about a lot. I have a quite a quixotic vision of that, because in some ways, I see it as this slightly embarrassing compulsion that I just can’t stop doing. There’s still that sort of sense of teenage embarrassment leftover that you know, who do I think I am to be trying to achieve this and why on earth would anyone listen to me? It’s still have a hobby that got out of hand. But if I’m completely honest, at the same time, I’ve always had this sense of mission behind wanting to write and wanting to talk about things that I don’t feel spoken about enough. Wanting to open up essentially a space in which I can consider the questions that I don’t know the answers to. I write books when I want to think something through. I write to find out what I think and feel about things. I think laterally, I’ve been coming to terms with the meaning that my books have had for people and I’ve really struggled with that. I found that confounding, after writing for a long time with no one really caring, to my first book talking about autism. And the response, even though that wasn’t a very big book, the response that that’s occasioned in a small number of people and how much that’s meant to them. And then Wintering, which has sort of done that on a mass scale. 

Elizabeth 

That book just took off, didn’t it? 

Honesty in writing and the new role leaders play today 

Katherine May 

It took off during the lockdown when I never saw a copy of it in a shop for two years and never got to meet an actual reader in person for the longest time. It felt completely unworldly, and just not real, just straightforwardly not real. In lots of ways it was comfortable for that to be not real. It’s really hard over the last year actually to stop pushing back against people saying, this stuff matters to me. They don’t need me being graceless about going oh, no, I’m sure it doesn’t, don’t worry about it. They need me to receive that in a more gracious way. I’m trying to pull up my big girl pants and actually learn to receive that better and learn to step into the role that that’s been offered to me here, as uncomfortable as it is. 

Elizabeth 

Someone who hungers for that role route will probably end up out of control guru, rather than someone who’s able to offer something genuinely human.

Katherine May

I’m so weary of gurus, they’re everywhere. They’re just everywhere. It’s not just like the sheer number of them that turn out to be abusers, it does seem to be a shockingly high hit rate. It’s also this idea that we can straightforwardly tell people how to get life right and that that will alleviate all of their suffering, and lift this terrible burden of the act of living from them. Just give them a set of right answers, like the cheat sheet and off you go, and everything will be fine. I find that so offensive. I think if nothing else, I’m motivated by keeping going into the forum to say, we don’t know. We don’t know. That’s not the point of any of this. Anyone who tells you that they do know, is not telling you the truth. They’re just making money from you. 

Elizabeth 

I wanted to ask you about honesty, because you made this move from writing novels to writing at least in part about your own life, and risk and exposure seems baked in to that decision. And my guess about one of the reasons that your books are connect with so many people is you’re just incredibly honest. You’re very honest about feeling embarrassed about wanting to talk about spirituality, but also wanting to talk about spirituality but also wanting not to be not taken seriously because you’re not irrational, you’re just interested in these things. But what even is rationality? The things that get overlooked as banal, right? Being on long term chronic sick leave, and then feeling so awkward and not wanting to be judged and feeling guilty for not being at work, but also not being able to be at work. Anyone who’s had any kind of like, more than a few days off sick has experienced that feeling. I have never seen it written about anywhere. As you write, how do you go about? Do you have a kind of philosophy? Is there a too honest, have you got more honest? How do you think about that particular value in your work?

Katherine May

I mean, it’s a balance. But as I’m writing I’m waiting for the kind of gut feeling that I’ve made contact with the thing I’m writing about. I’ll do multiple drafts where I get closer and closer and closer to the thing, the kind of emotional truth of it, the core of it, the part of it that transcends the circumstances of what happened. I’ll often get closer and closer until I really feel it.

But I also deliberately hold back some of the details. Some of them have to be mine, and I do think that people don’t understand the level of craft involved in writing a memoir, they value it for the truths that tell us, if you’ve written it well, what they don’t see all the stuff you’re putting behind the curtain to keep to yourself. So I love that people think I’m being straightforwardly honest. I move from being very careful with the facts, but very open with the emotional truths. That’s kind of an ethical principle in lots of ways. But also, it just helps me to feel like I’ve got something that I’m keeping, that not everybody does know everything about me. But they think they do. I think that’s the way it needs to play out. Because actually, as memoirs grow as a genre, I worry an awful lot about particularly younger people writing these very frank memoirs that will have impacts on their lives in ways that they won’t understand right now. I do feel very protective about how we’re treating this, this wonderful trade in honesty, and very fresh honesty about parts of life that we didn’t use to talk about. I would love to see publishing as a whole reflecting quite carefully on the risks that are inherent in that and how we can protect people from the rest of the world when you’ve been quite so exposed.

Elizabeth 

It’s not just writing a book now. Everyone’s online and they can find you and they can contact you and and feel a sense of ownership that they’re not entitled to. 

Katherine May 

I think there’s a discourse that says, you must reply to every person who contacts you, you must read every comment, even if they’re really toxic. You must make a response, you must witness what the whole world thinks of you. I don’t think there’s ever been a circumstance like that before. I’m increasingly up front because I think it’s really important to figure out a way through this. I don’t answer fan mail and the reason I don’t is because I can’t cope and I can’t be expected to cope with that level of human pain in my inbox every day. I am not the right person to pour this out to. It’s not fair on me and I can’t help you. Actually, in many ways, I need you to know that I’m not going to see it because I’m not the answer, unfortunately. I’m so sorry that the world is so unsupportive and it’s so hard to access support, but I’ve tried being everyone’s support network for a very short amount of time and I realised very quickly that it’s not okay. This is particular to female writers, I don’t think men get this stuff in quite the same way. And it’s particular to writers in minority groups as well. There is a huge failure of the mental health system in our society and of the social care system and of community and care just breaking down. I think I feel increasingly a responsibility to show people the stuff I’m not doing and that I can’t do and I can’t be expected to do.

Elizabeth 

That clarity is real kindness, I think. I’m sort of groping towards a question that I can’t quite crystallise. But it is about the role that writers like you are being asked to play and how it does relate to the changing religious or spiritual landscape. Leading books, which are so beautiful, and so honest, do play with this. I feel like one of the things I value about my tradition is being immersed in the church calendar, which takes you through seasons of fasting and feasting and attention and enchantment and wonder. I feel like those centuries old wisdoms about what humans need and how we work used to be passed down very imperfectly, and sometimes abusively, but generally well, by religious communities. But so few people feel able to access those now. I think Oliver Berkman is another person in this space who is really trying to dig deep into serious philosophy and wisdom, and both of you are getting called self help writers. You’re not going, here’s your 10 point life plan. When I’ve read your work, I was like, well, this is almost priestly. Particularly around attention, I think, there are really good priests being like, come and see, come and see, I will walk with you. And we will do this together, come and see. But as you say, you can’t do pastoral care for a flock of readers or followers on Instagram. 

Katherine May 

I agree with everything you’re saying. I think there are significant groups that are absorbing a kind of fallout from organised religion from but also from family wisdom, intergenerational wisdom being passed down. I’m really conscious of that role, actually. I don’t fully know how to manage it. I know now that I am, like, yeah, maybe priestly, I’d be uncomfortable with the leadership, that you’re being called on to offer leadership. The complicated thing for me is that I don’t seek that leadership. I love to figure stuff out for myself, but I resent anyone telling me otherwise. It’s unavoidable to notice how many people are seeking a flock and a seeking and wider community to be in but also they’re seeking the figureheads that can help them to unravel the world a bit and make sense of it for them. I think we have to be incredibly careful with that. You mentioned church abuses. I hate the way that we only talk about religion in terms of abuses. Now that’s absent in the secular world, we so often forget all the incredible things that organised religion has done, and we obsess over the negative parts. But we in the secular world are at a very similar risk, exactly the same that as soon as too much faith and not enough questioning is invested in individuals, then there is always a percentage who will misuse that. The very situation of people telling you that they have the answers can really be harmful to the leaders themselves in the way they see their role in the world.

At the moment one of the things I’m trying to figure out is, how we who are in that position can work together as a peer group to understand this role better and to deploy ourselves well within it. And to understand the boundaries of that, and to make those really clear. I see a massive rate of burnout amongst writers that are in the area that I work in. It’s a big question for me at the moment about what I can do to contribute to that. We need a kind of seminary for slightly spiritually toned writers who find themselves in leadership positions that they didn’t intend to get into. 

Elizabeth 

Centuries of religious leaders, and then more laterally counsellors and psychotherapists knew that you needed structure and you need oversight, you need supervision, all those kinds of things. And because of this strange diversification of our information environment, people aren’t going straight to those places that have established paths for leaders. Maybe you’re going to launch the Katherine May school for accidental spiritual leaders.

Katherine May

I mean, that’s a great name. Thank you for that. I’m giving it a lot of thought. We’ll see what we could do. I’ve worked a lot on peer support networks in my time, and I am trying to figure this out. Because it’s definitely necessary and we don’t have a roadmap here. 

Difference not deficit: navigating autism

Elizabeth 

This feels like a separate subject but I don’t think it is. You’re autistic. Didn’t you find that language quite late in life? How do you think that plays in for you as you’re trying to navigate this role and this vocation that you have?

Katherine May 

I think part of being autistic means that, like you, when we started our conversation, you said I don’t do small talk, I am very averse to small talk. So that’s the kind of positive side of it. I think the challenge of being autistic and finding myself in this role is that I have a history of social rejection, I’ve not yet met one autistic person that hasn’t. It’s very confounding to navigate a social world where you are suddenly praised for everything, and adored by complete strangers. That’s had, in a very weird way, a very tough impact on my mental health over the last couple of years. What does it mean to have this amazing, amazing, wonderful support and people wanting my leadership and wanting me to help them after years of feeling like a kind of pariah? I’m having to go very gently with this, because it’s very, very hard to accept that change in your treatment. And of course, it’s made me even more conscious the treatment that people like me receive all the way through our growing up, we are we are so often ostracized. 

That’s why I have to keep talking about autism. And what it feels like from the inside, even though I often don’t really want to anymore, is because I hope that at some point, people who are not autistic and not neurodivergent will learn to look at the people that they consider to be weird in their lives. And instead of gossiping about them and making rude comments and ostracising them we’ll start to say they just seem a bit different to me, and I’m going to leave them be. 

Elizabeth 

Feels like we’re in a sort of rapid education curve, hopefully around neurodiversity. I’ve had various autistic guests on recently, and you and one other person sent advice that was like, this is the language that works for me. It’s just so helpful. What are the kind of key things that you wish people who aren’t autistic understood? What are the kind of key things that you’re constantly myth busting about? Or you’re constantly being like, oh, if they could just tweak that that would help? 

Katherine May

First of all, thank you for saying autistic and not just digging yourself into a hole about it going on the sort of spectrum, because people feel really awkward about it. I think the most important thing is out front is that I’m not ashamed of being autistic in any way. I don’t see it as an embarrassment or a terrible thing, I see it as a genuine difference. I am often asking to be allowed for it to be a difference rather than a deficit. The huge experience for the vast majority of autistic people, the defining experience is a very different social and sensory environment. So we read social relationships really differently. That does mean that we don’t always relate to the way neurotypical people behave in exactly the same way that neurotypical people don’t relate to the way we react. Like it’s equal and different. 

I’ve had to fight really hard to understand that my responses to the world are just as valid as other people that I’m allowed to be more upset, I’m allowed to be upset when somebody squashes a fly, that is my authentic emotional response. I can’t suppress it. The thing that governs most of my interactions with people is my sensory response to things which is turned up to such an acute level, that if everything feels like a bombardment, so sound is very hard for me to deal with, like loud music, lots of people talking at once, a loud echoing room with a crowd in it physically painful. I will react in exactly the same way that a neurotypical person would react if they’re in severe pain, that same not in control of anything, just can only focus on how uncomfortable that is. For me, it’s the same with heat, with textures, I can’t wear wool. I can’t have like a mildly scratchy light, I can’t have any labels in any of my clothes, because that is literally the only thing I’ll be able to focus on all day. I could go on, but any kind of mild sensory input for me feels absolutely vast. That will make it very, very difficult for me to think straight for me to behave politely, honestly. I will react in the same way as if you’re kicking me while you’re talking to me, like if you’re trying to play loud music, I think the challenge is explained to people that they actually know what it feels like to be me a lot of the time. It’s just a different stimulus. But it’s safe to just believe people, when they straightforwardly tell you, they’re uncomfortable. That’s all we need to learn to do. 

I think the final thing I’d say is that we’ve been kind of obsessed with sorting autistic people into two categories, the genius ones, and the mentally disabled ones. And we need to step away from that very simplistic modelling. Yes, my brain does work differently to yours probably. I have this ability to go very deep into things and to completely obsess over them until I know everything, and then I can spew back everything out as well. I recognise that as different to the way that neurotypical people process information. Both are really important to society, we need both. But we can’t only value my way of thinking and we’ve got to stop looking for the people who we think are worthless. And that’s one of the things that troubles me the most about the way our conversations are progressing about autism. We’re getting less pushback about people like me being allowed to say we’re autistic without people saying, you’re not autistic, as though my end of the spectrum is okay by the rest of society. But at the same time, that’s being used as a kind of sorting device to say, you’re the valid ones. I’m so troubled by that I think we’re becoming more eugenic in our attitude as a society. I think the important thing to remember that that distinction, the distinction that would once have given me the label of Aspergers rather than autism, emanated from Nazi eugenics very specifically. It’s time for us all to challenge our thinking about all disabled people, and whether we get to judge whether they are valid or not. Tragically, for someone like me, organised religion does much better explaining why we value everybody than the secular world has managed so far. And that’s something we’ve got to work on.

Elizabeth

Katherine May, thank you so much for speaking to me.

Katherine May 

Thank you. It’s been amazing to talk to you and I could carry this conversation forever. It’s been really fun.

Elizabeth’s reflections

Elizabeth

What a sweetheart, honestly, there doesn’t seem to be another word for it. Katherine is so thoughtful and so kind. Having read her books, that didn’t come as a surprise, but it doesn’t always follow. Her second value is solitude. That makes a lot of sense on a lot of levels. I think her work and another book called Quiet that has come out in the last five years, have been really key for people who would call themselves introverted or people who are neurodivergent. Seeing their stories and their temperament in public as a legitimate way of being in the world as being a difference not a deficit, as Katherine said, these ways that were different, these really sometimes pretty stark differences in temperament and communication style and emotional needs. I think we are coming to this awareness of being able to hold those things as beautiful, as fascinating, as interesting, as making the world more vibrant, rather than necessarily being a threat or needing there to be a dominant mode into which everyone else falls.

The events buffer thing. I was talking to a friend recently who is on a journey like I think many more people in recent years, of asking herself if she might be neurodivergent and some of the ways that she and other people who do know that they’re artistic talk about meltdowns, these kind of moments of complete sensory overwhelm, a feeling out of control, a feeling like the whole bodily system has gone into complete meltdown, and how scary that can be. I think that shorthand of like beep, I’m done. Nothing more can come in here now. I’m really glad that Katherine has found that way of talking about what she needs and finding ways to look after herself. It is interesting. 

We didn’t set out to have a series with two autistic people talking about their autism. We invited them for a range of other reasons. But I do feel like I’ve had a crash course in autism this series and a crash course in the kind of attentive listening and increased awareness, of what does it mean to engage with people. I’m not autistic, so what does it mean for me to engage with people who have autism and to engage across those differences? This picture of Katherine as a child, what’s really coming to mind is Matilda. Matilda’s family were horrible and Katherine’s family clearly weren’t, and were very loving. But this kind of child who wanted to write, desperate to write, who didn’t necessarily find lots of encouragement or space or pathways laid out for her in her home life, but did really find it in school. 

Again in these interviews, good teachers come up. If you’re a good teacher, I just want to honour you and affirm you and say thank you for the work that you do. Generally underpaid, generally parents like me having too many opinions about what you’re doing and too much work. But that really, I think sacred, that sacred trust of walking with other people’s children and naming the gifts that you see in them and calling them out of them and saying people like Katherine on a path that they might not have found for themselves is just the most extraordinary and beautiful thing. I love the idea of her reading the dictionary. Gosh, just this picture of her like, like sucking on words like they’re sweets, just the treasure in the etymology and the sounds and the way across the dictionary, you can see the way the things they link together. Just beautiful.

But again, this embarrassment of creativity, I think a lot of people who feel like creative occasion feel this, like, is it all right? Is it legitimate? Is it stupid? Is it asking for people’s attention? I have felt it as I’m learning to write more publicly. I’ve never said this word out loud. I realize I’ve written it. G–A–U–C–H–E, that word. That’s embarrassing, to be like a child with a plasticine pot, you know, here’s this thing I made, don’t you think it’s lovely? The courage it takes to be a creative person to make something and put it into the world and know that people will judge and critique it. I wish we could find ways to lower the embarrassment around that. I think some people suffer more embarrassment than others. She said this great line about vulnerability in public, she’s really careful with the facts, but she is open with the emotional truth. I love that. I love the idea and it goes back to this old writing adage, what is most particular is most universal. But actually when we are given in, when it’s boundaried and healthy, when we are given an insight into someone else’s internal world, into the pain and hope and complex knot of being a person in the world, trying to be a human, it can feel so, it feels so humanizing. It can feel so we can feel so seen somehow in seeing someone else. We can feel so connected with such social creatures. We are so interconnected and interdependent and knowing that our experience of trying to be a human in the world, we’re not the only ones that feel the things we feel, that struggle with the things we struggle. That I think is the sort of beautiful, noble, high calling of art and creativity is it helps us see and hear each other at a deep level in a different way.

The Katherine May School for Accidental Spiritual Leaders, we were joking about it, but I do think seriously about, I think it’s one of the reasons I ask people about their vocation. I want people who are columnists or people who are business leaders or people who put politicians to think about it as vocation. Because when you have a religious vocation, there is a pathway. There is someone who will be like, are you sure? How is your character? How are you going to get supported? Who is going to be praying for you? The like weight of the thing is taken seriously. But there’s all kinds of other different sort of secular vocations. There’s no structure around, there’s no support. There’s no one saying, do you know what you’re taking on? What do you need to support yourself? You know, how do you not let it turn you into a monster? It’s not to say that the religious pathways are foolproof. But yes, it’s just such a tender human thing. It’s so raw, isn’t it? When someone writes and they seem or speaks and seems wise and kind and humane and trustworthy, my heart’s just like, oh, yes, teach me, teach me. I want there to be a grownup. I don’t want to have to be the grownup. I want someone else to be the grownup. In my tradition and my understanding, a lot of that is displaced because it’s supposed to be oriented towards God and we need to be sort of sceptical of our desire to treat other people with too much respect or too much dignity or too much affirmation. But we also can’t help it. We want leaders. We want authority figures. And also there’s this thing about elders, right? The people who pass wisdom down the generations who do say, I’ve walked this path, this is how you walk this path, that’s all good and I want it, but for those people like Katherine thrust into that position, that’s really, that’s soul work, doing it well. I’m hopeful about how she’s thinking about it and how seriously she’s taking it. Finally, on a sad note, autistic people have a long history of social rejection, I’ve never met one who didn’t. Chris Packham on this series also. Hideous, hideous social rejection, teenage trauma. I really hope that we’re learning better. Difference is not deficit. Difference doesn’t have to be threat. It can be an opportunity to learn and grow.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Sacred with Katherine May. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield. Our production team are Dan Turner and Fiona Hanscombe. You must have thought that’s strange I am not actually on the production team. But these things happen. Our music is by Luke Stanley, vocals by Lizzie Harvey and The Sacred is a project of the think tank, Theos. I would love you to check out the wider work of Theos research topics, really thoughtful commentary on anything you could want really. Something recently, a really fascinating long read on orthodoxy, the orthodox church, everything you would want to know. I felt very informed after reading it. You should go check that out. In the meantime, please do leave us a review or a rating or send an episode to a friend. We are so delighted that the podcast is finding its way into new conversations and new channels. If you’re here and you’ve stumbled upon us, maybe because you like Katherine May, we’re so glad you’re here. You can converse with us on social media or via email. I’d really like to hear what thoughts this episode left you with. Until next time, I will speak to you then.

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