Why So Many Women Don’t Know They are Autistic with Katherine May
June 20, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Big Treat for you today. We have a extraordinary thinker and writer that I have loved for a very long time. I have read every single thing she’s written. Her name is Katherine May and she is the New York Times bestselling author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, and Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which has been translated into 25 languages around the world. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times and The Times of London, and she lives by the Sea in Whitstable, England. I too want to say that I live by the sea in Whitstable, England.
Katherine May:
You could. It’s available. There are houses here.
Glennon Doyle:
I just want to say it. I’m going to add that sentence to my bio, Katherine.
Katherine May:
No, you can’t. It’s mine.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. It’s yours. Thank you for being with us today.
Katherine May:
Oh, thank you for having me. I’m excited!
Glennon Doyle:
Like I said, I’ve read all of your work and I think I read them out of order because I most recently read The Electricity of Every Living Thing.
Katherine May:
Oh, yeah. You’ve done it in reverse. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s interesting because I don’t know, I understand you backwards?
Katherine May:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
That’s probably fine.
Glennon Doyle:
I understand myself backwards too, Katherine. That’s the story of my life.
Katherine May:
That’s probably about as much as I know.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell us a story about when you were… I think you were listening to a radio interview about a woman describing her autism? Can you tell us that story?
Katherine May:
Yeah. I was at the end of my 30s and I was just driving to the optician one day, and this woman came on the radio and she started talking about what it was like to be autistic. I know it sounds crazy because, actually, a lot has changed even since then. That was only six or seven years ago and so much has changed for the better, but at the time, I would’ve considered myself to be someone that understood autism pretty well. Half my degree was in psychology. I had worked in school settings, I’d worked in special educational needs settings. I thought I knew it, but for the first time, I heard it described from the inside and immediately recognized myself after years and years of searching, a whole lifetime of searching and trying to figure out why I didn’t fit in with the pattern of living that everybody else seemed so comfortable in. And it was that instant. It was just immediate recognition, like we were the same person.
Glennon Doyle:
So beautiful. I remember reading that she was talking, and then the interviewer said something about “Aren’t, romantic relationships difficult for people with autism?” And you immediately thought, “Well, we’re not all like that.” And then you’re like, “Why did I say ‘we’?”
Katherine May:
Yeah, there was this sudden “we” and it was so interesting because the conversation about autism at the time was so male dominated. Not only was it thought the vision of the autistic person was a small boy, but also, it was always men who were talking about it. As the interview went on, I began to feel like this woman was being slightly patronized by someone who felt like they knew about it a bit better.
Glennon Doyle:
And she did.
Katherine May:
And all the kind of impossibilities were coming up, “Well, surely you can’t have a romantic relationship,” and that still comes up in the psychiatric community now. It’s a real problem for autistic people that it’s very hard for some people to believe that we are lovable. I think people sometimes think we are defined by our unlovability, but it is absolutely not true. I had this rising up of this “we”, like, “How dare you talk about us like that?” And that’s the beginning for me of feeling part of a community. I think the first time I’ve ever felt like I fitted in somewhere, honestly.
Amanda Doyle:
It struck me that that’s the power of internalized accounts of experience, because you’ve said that descriptions of autism are generally descriptions of what an autistic person looks like to a neurotypical person.
Katherine May:
Yeah, that’s exactly it.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s rarely what an autistic person feels like as an autistic person.
Katherine May:
Totally different. Yeah, completely. And having been through all the kind of literature on it, all of the descriptions are about what an autistic person will look like if they show up in your office. They might be moving in a certain way, they might say things, and as I began to look into the literature, I was so shocked by the way that it was often defined as how annoying it was to the practitioner that was encountering it. We were almost, by definition, these slightly unacceptable people, or at the very least, we’d look weird. The language is maybe not quite as direct as that, but that is definitely what it’s implying. And do you know what? Autistic people don’t seem weird to other autistic people. It’s as straightforward as that. It’s such an external story that then if you’re diagnosed, you’re told that story and you believe it. And so it comes with this set of impossibilities about how you could possibly be. You can’t be creative, you’ll never fall in love, you’ll never be happy. That’s the message that, that was going round and I think the community’s been challenging that really hard for a long time, and it’s beginning to stick.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about childhood, an account from the inside of childhood? I think you were 14 and you were at a party and you experienced the party. Can you tell us that story about how you saw everything?
Katherine May:
I always felt, right from the start, that I was very different to everyone else. It was this sense of being alien. I can remember being 9 or 10 and fantasizing that I could take off my skin and reveal the person I was supposed to be underneath. I felt like I wasn’t what I should be. Nobody had a story for that at the time because girls didn’t get diagnosed with autism at that time. There was no possibility of me forming a positive narrative. Like I said, I was trouble or difficult. That came up a lot for me, but there’s a bit in Electricity that I write about being 14 and at a party.
Katherine May:
Here’s a myth buster for you: there’s this common perception that autistic people are very unfeeling and that we don’t have emotions at all, but actually, if you talk to autistic people, they’ll say they’re feeling everything and they’re feeling the feelings of everyone else in the room. And if they’re not saying much, it’s because they’re often like, “We’re totally overwhelmed by the sheer weight of what’s coming at us.” I had this moment at this party when I realized that I was seeing lines running between all the different people in the party and they were kind of color-coded according to how people felt about each other. And so I started telling them, I was like, “I can see a line between you two.” Do not do this at a party with teenage girls. They will not love you for it.
Glennon Doyle:
That must have gone over well at 14 year olds. 14 year olds love people who are different and explaining things in a different way.
Katherine May:
Mm.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Katherine May:
Famously accepting of that kind of thing.
Amanda Doyle:
And who can see inside of them.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
14 year olds are very comfortable with you looking deep into them. Yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And being autistic, I didn’t always have a really solid understanding of what should be said out loud and what maybe is best kept quiet. So I’m going, “Oh, you two hate each other, don’t you? Wow! Oh, and you fancy her boyfriend.” Not one of my most successful social moments, but I’ve thought about that moment a lot ever since, because those lines looked so real to me. And it’s tempting to give it an esoteric answer and tell everyone I’m really psychic, but actually, I think it was synesthetic in lots of ways, and it was my brain’s way of trying to interpret this information that I didn’t have a way of processing, but which was coming across to me so strongly. I certainly don’t see lines anymore, but I do really recognize that I’m feeling everyone’s feelings,
Glennon Doyle:
Feeling everyone’s feelings. See, that is not what we’re told about people who have… Do you say people who have autism or people who have-
Katherine May:
Everyone’s different, but my choice of language is that I am autistic.
Glennon Doyle:
You are autistic, okay. So you can feel the feelings of everyone in a room, but you are not certain what is socially acceptable to say all the time? Would that be a thing?
Katherine May:
Yeah. I mean, I’m a lot better at it now. I’m a lot better trained at what to do, but certainly, when I was younger, I found it very hard to understand the rules. The rules aren’t written down and yet other people seem to inhale them with no explanation, whereas I need someone to tell me, “This is what we do here. You say this, you don’t say that.” And I still find it now, if I’m in a new situation that I’ve not been in before, I’ll go looking around for what the rules are, and I’ll ask people, and I’ll ask people really weird questions because I need to understand the detail. Do I talk to this person? Or what do I say to them? How polite should I be? Because otherwise it’s so easy to break unspoken rules and so hidden.
Glennon Doyle:
Does it feel like always being in a new… If I was in England in the Royal court and I would have no idea about how am I supposed to curtsy? Am I supposed to do this? Does it feel like that in every new situation?
Katherine May:
Yeah, but at least those people publish guides to etiquette. At least they’ve got the good grace to publish to Debretts or whatever it is, and I could read up on it. Whereas it’s actually a lot worse in casual situations, which sometimes aren’t as casual as they’re portraying themselves to be. Or you go to someone’s wedding and suddenly, the rules of conduct with people are entirely different to the normal rules. Different families have different conventions, and you mustn’t say this to X. It’s nightmarish, actually. It’s like a complete minefield for me.
Abby Wambach:
Do you have any safe spaces where you don’t have to worry about assimilating to these unspoken rules?
Katherine May:
Yeah, I need a lot of time to switch my face off. That’s what I call it. When I’m at home with my family, I don’t have to emote in the same way that I do when I’m out in public and I feel like I have to animate my face so that people can understand me, but it doesn’t feel authentic. I don’t mind doing it, but I know that I’m doing it for the benefit of other people. It’s a bit like speaking a different language, and that’s why I need a lot of time on my own because then I can just let my face do its face thing and it’s really nice. But I do find that the company of other autistic people is so much more relaxing and so much more restful and we can relax our faces together, but also, we do that thing… Autistic people will go straight to the heart of anything. They don’t dilly-dally. They’ll go straight from zero to the meaning of life in 30 seconds, and that’s where I’m comfortable. I can’t interest myself in small talk. I love going straight to it, which, I think, is why I like podcasts, actually, because that’s what we do, isn’t it? There’s no point in small talking on a podcast. Let’s talk about everything right now.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, yes.
Katherine May:
Oof.
Glennon Doyle:
What do you mean when you say, “People carry electricity for me”? Because it’s not just the lines between people that you’re sensing. You often feel like the world is made up of tiny electrical shocks for you, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
The touching and the consent, talk to us about how you experience all of that.
Katherine May:
Yeah. One of the features of autism is this really enhanced sensory perception. Everything feels turned up to 11. And for me, the thing that troubles me the most often is touch. If I touch another person or an animal or sometimes an inanimate thing, I feel like a tingle, like an electrical charge. If I’m not expecting to be touched or if I’m definitely not consenting to the touch, it’s like being hit with a cattle prod. It’s this horrible jolt of unpleasant electricity. So that means that things like moving through a crowd is a nightmare for me because I’m being touched all the time. If I have been through that, the feeling of that touch lingers on my skin for hours afterwards. I can feel it like almost burning. There’s this constant charge being directed at me, but I use it metaphorically too. It kind of works in both ways for me. On one hand it’s literal. I literally feel like people are buzzing me, but also, there’s a secondary part of that, which is that I can sense stuff that other people aren’t sensing. There’s this invisible feeling of current going on. And that’s positive too. I think that’s what makes my writing possible, that ability to tune in and to feel maybe things that seem too quiet to other people. And to engage that deeply, I think is where my creativity comes from. It’s got benefits and drawbacks.
Glennon Doyle:
If you’re feeling energy and everything, it’s not like you’re feeling something that’s not there, and that’s weird. You’re actually feeling something that is there that everyone else doesn’t feel because everything actually is made of energy.
Katherine May:
Yeah, it’s pretty direct for me. There are some people you tell that to and they’re like, “Oh, wow, you’re sensing auras or whatever.” It’s like, no, no, no, no. It’s much more literal than that. It’s just being hypersensitive. I’m massively sensitive to noise. I’m massively sensitive to light. An example that I often give is if I’m sitting in a meeting room and someone’s got one of those overhead projectors on, every time I blink, the beam of light splits into rainbows. It took me years to realize that that doesn’t happen to everybody, but there’s this sort of minute level of sensing that is happening for me that I have to then conceal because if you’re constantly reacting to that level of input, you are looking really twitchy. And so then you learn to not react all the time, which means that I then… That’s exhausting.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, of course.
Katherine May:
And also, I then don’t react properly when something bad’s happening. So if I’m in pain and I go to the doctor and say, “I’m in pain,” they don’t believe me because I’m like, “I’m in pain,” because I’ve learned so well to-
Glennon Doyle:
Mask.
Katherine May:
Dumb it down. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But what you’re saying is that when you’re seeing the rainbow in the white light, like, Podsquad, Katherine’s not seeing magical rainbows. She’s actually just-
Katherine May:
It’s not magical.
Glennon Doyle:
That is what white light is. She’s just seeing deeper and differently than everyone else. And then you have to pretend you’re not seeing rainbows with your face.
Katherine May:
Yes. Yeah. Well, in fact, that one was easy because I didn’t realize that other people weren’t, so I just thought, “Oh, everyone’s sitting in a room full of rainbows.” The rainbows are actually quite annoying because it’s quite jolty, but yeah, it took me a long time. I think when you learn you’re autistic, a really common thing is you start questioning everything and you start saying to people, “Can you see the rainbows?” And it’s like, “No, other people cannot see the rainbows in an overhead projector apparently.”
Amanda Doyle:
So if you’re sitting in that room and there’s rainbows, there’s something else, there’s a third thing, do you have to just not react to any of it, assuming that it’s all things that no one else can see? Because how do you know which things to react to and acknowledge? Do you have to wait till other people acknowledge them to know that they’re seeing it?
Katherine May:
Yeah, and what it will mean is I’m often quite distracted if I’m in a room with other people, because someone will have really strong perfume on, which I find completely unbearable and stuff hums in public buildings. There’s always something buzzing or humming, like a fluorescent light or a radiator or whatever, and someone’s talking too loudly at the back and fidgeting with a pen and the light is splitting or flashing or all of that stuff. And there’s two ways it goes. Most of the time, I’m so busy trying to ignore all those things and ignoring the discomfort that I’m quite in my own head and not in the room with people, not being there. But then, sometimes it really pushes you over the edge. You can get really upset or lose your temper. When you see autistic people having a meltdown or seeming to behave irrationally, we’re behaving in exactly the same way that a neurotypical person would if they had a loudspeaker blaring in their ear and having to wear a Velcro shirt turned inside-out or something. That’s the level of discomfort we’re at. When you see neurotypical people in pain, they react in exactly the same way, but for us, we’re at that threshold in just everyday life, and it’s just really, really difficult to cope with.
Amanda Doyle:
Can you tell the story of that you put together after the fact of at work with the dress and how you understood yourself after the fact?
Katherine May:
Yeah. There’s a scene I describe in the book where we had to do this training to support people with dementia, and it involved a lot of role play. I am not a friend of the role play. It’s just my worst nightmare.
Glennon Doyle:
Is it role play inception because you’re like, “I’m role playing all the time”?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, like, “I’m already role playing. I can’t role play. I’m role playing every day that I show up here. Okay, people?”
Katherine May:
No more role play! Yeah, but I think this is a good example of the kind of mistake, social mistake that autistic people make, which is that we’ve been told in advance to bring something significant connected with a wedding. And when I got there, everybody else had understood the rule that it wasn’t to be too much. So they’d bought a little invitation they had from a recent wedding or a photograph. I’d bought my wedding dress. I’d bought the whole thing in because that was an important thing to me connected to a wedding. Like, ‘course! I was just following the rules.
Katherine May:
And so what ensued was you could just feel this sense of embarrassment arising from the other people in the room because I’d overstepped and I think they thought I wanted something from them about this dress. And they were like, “Oh, it’s really nice.” It’s like, “I know it’s nice. It’s my wedding dress. I liked it too. Whatever! I don’t care what you think of it.” This is the horrible thing for me, is that you suddenly realize that you’ve transgressed and you can’t reverse out of it, but you’re still not that sure what the transgression actually is. Anyway, I got so flustered that I ended up leaving my wedding dress behind and somebody took it. So that’s how I lost my wedding dress, unfortunately.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, my gosh!
Glennon Doyle:
That wasn’t in the book. Someone took it?
Katherine May:
Yeah, it was in a university room. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Sorry.
Abby Wambach:
That’s not fair. I’m actually upset about this. When you’re in the room and you sense other people’s embarrassment, do you feel embarrassed now because they’re embarrassed? Are you feeling like, “Oh, shit. I’ve done something wrong here by the social standards?” Are you feeling or is that a hard emotion for you to-
Katherine May:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, I can feel it in my throat. Other people’s embarrassment is like a fog. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s really funny that most of the time, I don’t even notice it. It’s only when I stop to think about it, but I’m very, very sensitive to other people’s strong feelings. It’s horrible for people, isn’t it? It’s like hyper-empathy. It’s not the lack of empathy that we’re often told we have. It’s actually this hyper-empathy that is another sensory input. It feels physical to me.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s beautiful and amazing to me. So you told your sweet husband. I love this part. When you said, “I am autistic,” you were hoping he’d be like, “Well, I am shocked you, because you are the most normal person I’ve ever met,” but he did not say those exact words.
Katherine May:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us about that.
Katherine May:
Once I’d realized, it took me a long time to talk to him about it because it seemed like… I mean, we’d been together for 20 years by then and it seemed like such a bomb to drop in our relationship. You’ve been through coming out things in, after long marriages. You know but it’s like the person that knows you best in the world, how do you confront what felt like a huge change to me? I eventually got the courage lying in bed one night and said, “I think I’m autistic.” And his response was like, “Yeah, yeah, I reckon,” and that was it. I was like, “What? What?” And he was like, “Absolutely. I’ve often thought it.” And I said, “Do you see yourself as my carer?” And he was like, “No, of course not. That’s just you and it’s how you are.” It was actually a lovely moment of complete acceptance, but there was that small part of me that wanted to feel like I’d managed to fake it to him too. And of course, I couldn’t and I hadn’t and it didn’t matter.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us a little bit about what it was like to be a mom of a young kid with little Bert, because oof! Those descriptions.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I found that really hard.
Glennon Doyle:
To be a person who hears the fan in an overhead projector and then to bring a screaming infant home with the touch and the sound that is just… Talk to us about what that was like.
Katherine May:
Yeah. It was incredibly hard and I found the stage before that really difficult as well. Pregnancy, for me, was a sensory nightmare. I just was bombarded with sensation. And then to give birth in a hospital, which was noisy and full of people and full of unwanted touch. People do not wait to ask your consent for touching you when you are in a maternity ward. Wow! And I had a very long labor. I was 44 hours in labor. Yeah, yeah. It was long. In fact, fun story. I dislocated my hip while I was in labor.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, my God!
Katherine May:
Yeah, there was a bit of a stuck situation, but I only last week found that I’d permanently injured my hip and I need to have surgery on it.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, shit.
Katherine May:
Because I’ve been going back for 10 years saying, “My hip hurts,” but again, nobody’s realized how bad the injury was. So that’s like, “There you go. That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about.”
Amanda Doyle:
Because of the minimizing, because they think-
Katherine May:
Because the minimizing.
Amanda Doyle:
If you were in that much pain, you would be wild right now, and you’re so level that you can’t be.
Katherine May:
Absolutely. Yeah. So my physio finally saw some CT scans for it last week, and he was like, “Oh, my God, that’s brutal!” And I was like, “Yeah, I told you it hurt.”
Amanda Doyle:
What an analogy for all of life.
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the early baby stage was so hard for me. I was so overwhelmed. The crying and screaming is hard and the constant touch that a baby required was really difficult, but I think the thing that I found the most harmful was this sense of who I was supposed to be as a mom. I’d suddenly lost all my identity and people were calling me mom. Complete strangers can suddenly call you mom, which I found just weird. Sorry, where did that social rule come from? And whenever I said, “I feel really depressed, I feel really overwhelmed,” the solution was always, “Join a mom and baby group,” and it’s like, “No, for an autistic person, that’s my worst nightmare. That’s another really noisy, uncomfortable, unreadable social situation.” I felt incredibly isolated and I couldn’t explain what I was going through. Again, there was no roadmap for my experience.
Katherine May:
There was this set of assumptions that dropped in, which was that I was lonely and I needed the company of other mums, and I did not need the company of other mums. I rarely need the company of other people. It runs in the opposite direction for me, I needed some time alone, but I also just needed someone to understand. What I was trying to express was the sensory issues with having a small baby and how you could utterly love this person and be utterly committed to their care, but also, your neurological makeup is making you so overwhelmed that you just can’t stop falling asleep. I was just asleep all the time. I thought there was something seriously wrong with me because I just kept cutting out an engine that had been overheated.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s this moment you talk about, I think you were going for a long walk because you walked to not have to do all this masking, and it’s the place you can be free, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And so you were talking to your husband one day and said, “Well, I just, I’m feeling bad that I’m taking so much time away, so I’m going to stay with you all,” with Bert and your husband and he was resistant to it, and he said, “Our time together is easier without you.” Oh, he didn’t say that, but he said, “When you’re with us, everything bothers you.”
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
That moment, for me, was just like… I don’t know. I related so deeply about how that must have felt. How did that feel?
Katherine May:
It was, I think, honestly, one of the hardest moments of my life. In Electricity, I write about I walked the southwest coast path and I needed this walk and I was going out and walking. H and Bert would go off on their own and do a nice thing. They would go to a children’s zoo or whatever, but I began to feel really guilty for all this time I was spending alone. I thought that when I said, “No, no, no, I’m not going to walk tomorrow, I’m going to spend the time with you,” they’d be like, “Yay! We’ve got you back.” And instead, there was this awkward shuffling and this, “Well, actually, we kind of don’t want you around because it’s more fun with without you.” And of course, he didn’t mean that in general, but what he meant was I can’t tolerate a children’s zoo, or I can’t tolerate a fairground. I get fed up, I get completely overwhelmed, and I want to go home.
Katherine May:
I still know this now. When it’s just the two of them, they stay out for a lot longer than I do because I reach my limit. It was so painful to learn that, that actually, rather than being the mom that they were missing and wanted to spend more time with them, they were like, “Oh, we have a nice time without her, and thank God she’s going and doing this little walk.” And it came from a good place because they knew that I was calming myself and that I was actually coming back feeling better, but that was a hard, hard moment to realize that I was not always a positive effect. Me being there was not always a positive thing for our little family.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I get that.
Katherine May:
What I’m saying is I’m a pain in the arse.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get that. A beautiful pain in the ass. So you start telling people outside of your family. Talk to us about when you tell someone, how you’re afraid they’re going to treat you differently or see you differently. I remember hearing that one of your friends, when you told them that you were autistic, one of them said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” What the actual fuck, Katherine? How did that go and how does it go now? How does it go well, how does it go poorly?
Katherine May:
It’s actually the best test of how decent people are that I know now because actually, it really sorts the wheat from the chaff when you tell them you’re autistic. Some people just back away from you and never speak to you again. It’s like, “Great, bye! Thanks very much.” But when I first said I was autistic on Twitter, I lost a quarter of my followers overnight immediately, and got a few angry emails from men. Specifically. Sorry, men, but yeah, got a few angry emails like, “How dare you?” One of them was like, “I thought you were normal.” It’s like, “Yeah, well, I was never putting that around.” And there was this moment for all my doubts through the process, and what was I in this and what did I think of myself and what did it mean. The first time someone said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I was furious. And it made me really understand that I was beginning to value that new identity, profoundly value it, and that it really mattered to me, and that I knew I was no worse than anyone else. Just different.
Katherine May:
But there were some lovely, lovely, lovely responses too, and people really being thoughtful about it and saying, “I kind of understand this thing about you now that I always wondered about.” One of my friends said, “That’s why you always disappear at parties.” And I was like, “What? What?” And she was like, “Every single party I’ve ever been with you, you’ve just vanished at some point in the evening.” I thought I was hiding it a lot better than that, but I would tell myself that I loved parties and that each individual party wasn’t a party for me and I wasn’t enjoying it. It’s amazing that is about the narratives you tell yourself and learning I was autistic let me go, “Oh, I hate parties. Parties are awful. Oh, my God!” And I was always hiding at the bottom of the garden or locking myself in the bathroom. Sometimes I’d crawl under the pile of coats on the bed and it’s nice under there incidentally. Anyone never needs a nice little place, it’s great.
Glennon Doyle:
I used to think that every boy I kissed was just a bad kisser.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And it wasn’t that.
Glennon Doyle:
No, it sure wasn’t, Katherine. It sure wasn’t. And then when you find out, so much of the individual assessments of everything just, and then also stuff you thought was damage about yourself.
Katherine May:
Oh, I know.
Glennon Doyle:
And then you become part of this community and the fury that comes up in response to anyone’s pity is actually suddenly pride. It’s a connection or-
Katherine May:
People talk so much about identity politics and problematize it, and those people have just never experienced what it’s like to finally know what you are and the way that everything falls into place and the way that suddenly your self-worth just lands like, “I’m not a wonky neurotypical. I’m a great autistic person. I’m really good at it.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah.
Katherine May:
Actually, I’m not, because I still struggle to meet my own needs within it because it takes a lifetime of unlearning, but yeah, I’m trying.
Amanda Doyle:
To finally know what you are. That’s such a lesson broadly, because this is about this, of course. And also, all of us are walking around masking something about ourselves.
Katherine May:
Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
And when you finally know what you are and you can accept it, then you’re just out there being who you are. There’s something beautiful about that.
Katherine May:
So simple, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
And the proof is really in the pudding. The studies that say that only 5% of autistic people are confident that they would change it if they could, it’s like this outside world is looking and saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And the people inside the world are looking out at the other world and being like, “We’re sorry for y’all.”
Katherine May:
Yeah. We’re not even doing that. We’re like, “This is just fine, but what we need you guys to do is maybe turn the sound down a bit and leave us alone a little.” And everyone’s grand.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
But yeah, it’s such a big thing.
Glennon Doyle:
What struck me so much about when you talk about this is I think an outside perspective would be, “Well, you’re doing a great job being autistic,” when you are-
Katherine May:
“Well done, you.”
Glennon Doyle:
When you’re assimilating as much as possible. When you’re staying longer at the party, but actually, the inside perspective is, “No, no, no. I know when I’m doing that, I’m not doing the best job.”
Katherine May:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us about that. What’s the measure?
Katherine May:
You have to learn all these counterintuitive things, and actually, you have to learn that in defiance of a lot of the therapies that are offered for autism too, which say, “We are going to teach you how to look like a neurotypical on the outside,” and that those often do a lot of harm, honestly. They teach you to mask even harder and to probably feel even greater shame at not converting. But for me, learning I was autistic was a moment when I started to be able to think, “Oh, this isn’t just me being awkward. This is a need that’s expressed on a bodily level and I need to learn how to meet it now.” And so I learned that I needed more quiet in my life. I needed more times when I wasn’t talking. I needed different social situations. I’m really happy talking to one or two people, or three maybe, but not 10, and certainly not 20.
Katherine May:
I needed more rest. I needed to walk and to move. There’s something about that electrical feeling that really goes away if I can tire my body out, and that somatically soothing, rhythmic work, like walking, for me, is what works really well. I need to submerge myself in water regularly. That helps me so much. It calms me right down. It takes me back into my body when I feel like I’ve left it entirely. All of those things are our needs in the same way that, and you’re a typical person might be like, “I need to see people. I need to party sometimes.” There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I need. And when you start thinking about these things in terms of need, everything changes. It’s another rearrangement, but it’s still very hard because expressing those needs often puts you on a collision course with everyone else’s needs. I still have to choose when I get to say it, because sometimes, it’s too much trouble to even bother and it can cause more fuss. You learn that. I think I’ll be learning it for the rest of my life how to get it right because also, sometimes I over adjusted as well. First of all, I thought I never wanted to see another human being for the rest of my life and that wasn’t true. I like people, just not all at once.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. But the measure of progress for you is not, “I’m getting less overwhelmed.” It’s, “I’m saying when I’m overwhelmed and leaving.”
Katherine May:
Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s both, actually, because I am so much less overwhelmed on a moment-to-moment basis that it’s really hard to even imagine what life was like for me before, honestly. I used to put my feet into shoes that made me uncomfortable and clothes that were uncomfortable, and even little things like that were itching away at me on a moment-to-moment basis. But for me, the real hard work behind it, the real practice I have to keep returning to and reminding myself of is I get to meet my own needs. What are my needs? I have to understand what they are. They’ve been so far pushed down across a whole lifetime that it was hard at first to even perceive that. My intuition was all wonky, my gut feelings were all out of line, and my ability to understand what I needed and when was just thrown out. Totally.
Glennon Doyle:
So you’re like a detective and a mystery at the same time, right? Because you’re writing about being introspective, you’re chasing who you are, but you’re also running from… Because that’s what we all do, the cat and the tail. Before I understood that I was queer, I used to, every once in a while, read a review because I have a hard and fast rule for myself that I will never read a review. So I read them all.
Katherine May:
So of course you read them all the time, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. So that would say, “Oh, she’s queer,” and this is way before.
Katherine May:
Really? Because your work before was wow. That’s interesting. Sorry, I’m going to ask you questions now. Was it other queer people who saw that in you? Or was it straight people being accusatory?
Glennon Doyle:
No, I think it was queer people being like, “Oh, my God, she’s going to be out in a few years,” because I think a lot of my work was trying to understand, “What is this kissing people are excited about? What is sex? I don’t get it.” So it’s weird to have people watching who are ahead of you. Did no one in your life ever say, “Hey, have you considered autism?”
Katherine May:
No. But I think, again, even those few years ago, we were so far behind on understanding what it was. I don’t think it was possible. I think now, even now, it would’ve changed, but I’ve been part of introducing that concept to everybody. I now have that feeling, I see people who are clearly autistic or neurodivergent, and sometimes I’m in conversation with them and I’m like, “Do I tell you? It would solve so many problems for you,” but of course you can’t because it is something you have to understand for yourself. I think it is a kind of journey. You can’t impose it on anyone, but then six months later, those people are often in my inbox going, “Oh, hi, Katherine. I just wonder if I could talk to you because I think I might…” You’re like, “Yeah. Yeah, you are. Welcome! Come in, come in.”
Amanda Doyle:
So is that part of your working rule, is that you think it’s important for people to come to it on their own? Because it seems like your husband believed that it was important for you to come to it on your own.
Katherine May:
I don’t know if he’d have thought about it in those terms. I think he’s just not someone that would… He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t diagnose you in that kind of way. I think autism is still such a difficult language for so many people. You never know how it’s going to land. I don’t ever want to make people feel like a power place happening. I think that’s how it can land sometimes if you say, “I think you’re autistic.” I think it can feel insulting to people. I don’t think it’s insulting, but I get that. I also think it can be a way of saying, “I know more about you than you do,” which, of course, is an incredibly uncomfortable feeling. And also, I have no right to diagnose anybody else either. And so I just listen and explain my experiences in the context of autism and see if that can land a little sometimes.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like when some of our kids’ friends come over and I get that gaydar sense, and I just keep my pretty little mouth shut, and I just think, “Well, we’ll see what happens in a couple of years.” It’s the same feeling. Like recognizes like, but under these circumstances of where we are in the world and all of the ways that we impose shame on some of these things, and also that’s their journey. You can’t snap that from them.
Katherine May:
You can’t take that from them.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
But what’s amazing is you are there, and when they come to that, they’ll know to come to you. They’ll have this model there, and I’m really happy with that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Quite often, Katherine, I get a letter from someone in the pod squad telling me that I have autism and listing out all the reasons, and I don’t like it, but it’s not because of a negative feeling about it. It’s because I don’t like when people think they know more about me than I do.
Katherine May:
Yeah, I agree.
Glennon Doyle:
So that’s how I felt about the queer thing. I was like, “I like queer people better than straight people for sure.” So it wasn’t that. It was like, “Wait, I’m doing my best. No one’s trying harder to know what they are than I am. So give me some time.”
Katherine May:
But also, autism is a complicated label, and it’s based on some very shoddy research and that research has not been fully resolved out of the psychological community yet. New researchers are beginning to come in, autistic researchers researching autism are beginning to come in, and we are now at a place where we understand less about autism than we think we did 10 years ago.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow!
Katherine May:
Everything’s up in the air. Not everyone will admit that to you, but the people that are at the forefront of the research will now say to you, “We no longer have a very stable definition of autism.” And I think given time, that label is going to change. We might use different words for it. We might have a more nuanced understanding of it, but it is so singular to individual people that to go in and land that label on them, to me, feels really aggressive because it’s not a stable understanding. The best we have at the moment is this community of people who are like, “I see you, you see me. We’re the same.” But I can’t even articulate how we’re the same because you might not be able to bear water touching your skin and I crave it, or you might crave really loud music to settle yourself, and I can’t bear it.
Katherine May:
We can see the lineage between those two experiences, but how do you start to define that and the kind of character that comes with it? It’s a little bit like the LBTQ community that are now so atomic in a really exciting way. People are really beginning to think about gender in, to me, exciting ways. There’s a huge crossover between autistic people are much more likely to be trans, gay, bisexual, non-binary, asexual. We do not fit squarely onto the binary gender spectrum in any way. Most of us are very uncomfortable with that. It’s not the moment for us to go out and be taking converts because we don’t know. And it’s a great moment for people to be saying, “I recognize this. I’m coming towards you.”
Glennon Doyle:
The accounts from the inside are so freaking important because a lot of what I’ve read has reinforced the idea that autism means you don’t feel the feelings of other people
Katherine May:
Or even your own feelings, let’s face it.
Glennon Doyle:
So I’m like, “Oh, God, I can’t even walk into a room without feeling so much.” So it’s just wonderful to hear.
Katherine May:
And let’s politicize this a little bit as well, because what would be the best way to other a group of people? It would be to say you don’t feel the most valued human emotions, particularly love. I gave up talking about Electricity at literary festivals because people kept asking me if I was capable of loving my son. I can’t imagine a more offensive or othering question to ask anybody. And to hear a whole hour of me speaking and then to wonder if I was capable of something that our society values above all else is a good thing. We have to understand that we have created a definition of autism that is supposed to be repellent and that is supposed to identify an out-group of people who we don’t think are quite fully human and quite good enough, and why would anyone feel invited into that label? But it’s full of untruths and it’s so dangerous as well, because our only understanding of autism on a big scale at the moment is people in crisis and people struggling. We don’t have a solid picture of happy autistic people or autistic people who are coping or autistic people who are leading a productive life, and we urgently need those things out there.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell us about the raptor imprint?
Katherine May:
About the raptor imprint?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I remember reading about it in The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and it was like an imprint in this thing and then you said, “I am an imprint who is learning my wildness again.”
Katherine May:
Yeah, no, I now see what you’re talking about. Hawks.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes!
Katherine May:
And birds. And wild birds. And actually, parrots and pigeons as well, when we tame them, it’s called imprinting because we are teaching them to treat the human as their mother bird essentially, and therefore, we are teaching them human acceptable behaviors. Those birds get called an imprint because they’re not natural birds. They’re not exhibiting their natural bird behavior. They’re exhibiting learnt behavior from humans. That really helped me to think about myself, actually. It really helped me to understand what my state of being was, which is that I was a different creature who had learnt their neurotypical behavior from the outside and had learned to mimic it, and had learnt to behave in a way that pleased neurotypical society, but which was actually not elemental to me. But one thing we do know is that it’s very unlikely that an imprinted bird can ever lose its imprinting. I think there’s a truth in that for me too. I have not grown up understanding how to be me, and I’m not truly sure what that would look like 100%. I inch closer to it, but-
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, you’re relearning your wildness. Katherine, I wrote this book called Untamed and the-
Katherine May:
Yes, I know it well.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow! Okay. So when I read your story about being an imprint and relearning your wild, I immediately just wanted to call you because the parable story that I opened Untamed with was about a cheetah-
Katherine May:
You’re a cheetah, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Who was running back and forth on this ridiculous performance for the crowd because the cheetah had been raised with a black lab to learn how to be a lab, not a cheetah, but they have found that these cheetahs somehow, even when they’re born in captivity and they’ve only known themselves as labs, have still the wild cheetah-ness inside of them and can be re-wilded.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I love it.
Katherine May:
It’s such a compelling image. Oh, I don’t know. It fills me with sadness, actually, because I think the more I’ve understood my own tamedness and how hard it is to combat that sense of having been tamed, sometimes quite aggressively, the more it breaks my heart when I see tamed animals as well. I feel that link so strongly, but also, when you start untaming yourself, when you start re-wilding yourself, de-imprinting yourself, you see other humans all around you who are in desperate need of it. It really does break my heart when I come across those people. And obviously being me, I feel their discomfort. I feel the discomfort they’re living with, whatever that’s about, whatever it is that they’re suppressing. There’s a lot for us all to learn on that, but it’s such a beautiful thing, such thing when you start to do it.
Glennon Doyle:
Katherine May, thank you. You’re just such a teacher for every single person who is trying to live closer to who they were born to be and not who the world tamed them to be, and that is everyone on the earth.
Abby Wambach:
Katherine, I just want to thank you so much because Glennon, she talked a little bit about getting the emails of people thinking she’s autistic, and regardless of whether she is or not, your work brings me closer to understanding a highly sensitive person and somebody who might need to take care of themselves in different ways that I wouldn’t necessarily need to. And so I’m just so grateful to you for the work that you do and for giving me the idea bubbles that make me think, “Okay, Abby, maybe you’re not like Glennon, and maybe she needs something different.”
Katherine May:
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
Glennon Doyle:
Am I one of those people, Katherine, that you’re like, “I think she might be back to me in a few years”?
Katherine May:
Yeah. I’ve always thought that, I have to say. Other people read your book thinking you were gay, but I was like, “Oh yeah, she’s one.” But the label is yours that you choose to wear. And also, the way you approach that is as well, because for a lot of people, they don’t feel happy identifying in that way unless they are fully diagnosed by someone with letters after their name. But for loads of people now, self-diagnosis is becoming more valid because so many of the diagnostic criteria are out of date. There are so many ways to approach it, but the most up-to-date researchers are talking about hyper-empathy and hyper-creativity, and that female autistics in particular report that, although I think that probably just means that we are missing a load of male autistics who don’t understand that they can identify in that way too, rather than the other way around.
Abby Wambach:
Huh! Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
Wow. The research has historically been on middle class white-
Katherine May:
Young boys.
Amanda Doyle:
10-year-old, old boys.?
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s shocking. That is so different than every other research.
Amanda Doyle:
So there’s now all of this different diagnostics that are adult women, the way it’s shown?
Katherine May:
Well, there’s very little standardized, but there are different practitioners who are specializing in identifying autistic women now. One of the reasons it’s important to talk about women in this is that we are more likely to have been missed in childhood because of the gender bias, and so we don’t actually have very good standardized methods of understanding who we are. And so there’s a lot of innovation going on at the moment, but just to just tell you how it was for me when I went for my diagnosis, I was taken into a room with a child’s speech therapist and sat on a tiny chair for children, I’m six feet tall, and given a children’s book to read and asked if I understood the story.
Abby Wambach:
No!
Amanda Doyle:
No, that did not happen.
Katherine May:
That absolutely happened. And I said, “I’m halfway through a PhD in Narratology at the moment and I’m a writer. I understand stories really well. Thanks very much.” And I was just told, “Well, this is the best we’ve got.” I was so humiliated I left because it was not okay. We are moving forward in that now, but I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to really validate people who self-identify as well. Not least because a lot of people can’t afford to access good care and good diagnosis, but also because sometimes, the community knows better at the moment. We are just not there yet in a really stable way.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you, Katherine May.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you so much.
Glennon Doyle:
You are the absolute best.
Abby Wambach:
Awesome.
Glennon Doyle:
Also, your husband. Just adore him.
Katherine May:
Being very quiet outside the door.
Glennon Doyle:
Bye, Pod squad. See you next time.
Amanda Doyle:
If this conversation has you asking yourself questions about whether you or someone you love might be autistic. Here’s a little postscript to the show. Katherine shared with us that she hears regularly from people who think they might be autistic and want more information, as well as from people who have received an autism diagnosis and are struggling with what that means. She was kind enough to share with us some of her resources for helping to identify and understand autism, which I will now share with you. First, she wants us to know about the autism spectrum. Autism is not one consistent experience. Instead, each autistic person is unique. The term “autism spectrum” does not refer to people being “more or less autistic as is commonly thought,” and neither does it suggest that “we are all a little bit autistic.” Instead, it points to the range of experiences with autism.
Amanda Doyle:
Autism is a neurological difference that affects how people interact with and experience the world. Katherine wants to share this list of some of the things you might notice challenges with or differences in if you have autism. One, sensory processing that is being more or less affected by smell, light, touch, sound, and taste than the general population. Two, in your social life, you may find social situations challenging or you may feel different from others. Three, emotional perception. For example, if you find it difficult to understand your own feelings or feel overwhelmed by strong emotions or empathy. Four, intense interests and fascinations that feel central to who you are. Five, anxiety, meltdowns, and shutdowns. This is extreme distress caused by everyday experiences. Six, executive function issues. Autism often co-occur with other neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, as well as physiological conditions such as hypermobility, epilepsy, and gut problems. It is worth noting that some of the features of autism, such as anxiety, may be due to the lived experience of autistic people rather than being intrinsic to autism itself. The information I’ve just shared, as well as a multitude of other resources, can be found at Katherine’s autism research page, which is katherine-may.co.uk.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do each or all of these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios