Another Kind of Winter...

Briefly:

Support me on Patreon | Another kind of winter | Ramblers Association event | Embracing winter in the Guardian | Krasnostein, Elissa Altman and Sharon Blackie at the Rookery

Hello,

On the cusp of the dark season, I wanted to write today about making friends with winter. But I’m currently walking through another kind of winter, so I thought I might share my knowledge of that instead.

My brain has ground to a halt. I felt it coming over the last week, and then, yesterday, I crashed like a shoddy computer. The first sign came in the supermarket car park, when I drove the wrong way up a one-way lane. It wasn’t that I missed the marking on the road that told me which way to go. No: I had to pause to study it for a while, because I couldn’t quite interpret it. It was an arrow, yes, but what was it telling me? I didn’t know. I made a choice, and it was the wrong one. Luckily, the worse that happened was getting sworn at by the driver coming the other way. I won’t be driving for a few days. 

Later, somebody familiar came to the door, and their face flickered like the pages of a thumbed book until I could recognise them from their voice. I went for a swim, and realised hours later that I’d misplaced my swimming bag full of wet towels. I tried to trace the journey in my mind - a five minute walk back to my front door - and found only a blank. So it went on. My family came home, and I realised that I was almost entirely without language. I could - can - still think in words (hence the typing), but I could not say them. My mouth was immobile. When they asked me questions, I had to fight past the static to access any of my thoughts.

As long as I take a rest, this will pass in a couple of days. I could do with a good night’s sleep, which is strangely elusive at the moment, despite an all-encompassing tiredness. When I close my eyes, my brain spits back a succession of the things I’ve meant to address over the last week or so, and so sleep doesn’t come. I am writing this now to tame those thoughts a little. It’s almost agonising to do it - and so very slow - but it’s also agonising not to. I am in the domain of slow processing. I have to work through every last thing to clear the fog. 

I think I’ve always written to explain myself, to dig a channel for the words that get dammed up, and to form them into a coherent account. Why are you like this? It was a question I was asked many, many times before I had the word for it. Autism. I know a lot of people hate reading that word. I know it feels too big and blunt for some, especially when it’s applied to someone like me, who is after all so affable and capable, so alive to social nuance. It feels like too much to ask, like a demand on your care and attention when there are others out there far more deserving of it. 

But that was another way of explaining myself, a far more effective way than years of introspection and self-justification. That word - when shared between a community of minds rather than imposed from the outside - is a penknife that unfolds to solve a range of problems that you didn’t even know you had. Before I had that word, I had no way of addressing any one of my problems, because the psychological toolkit I was offered contained the wrong tools, cross-head screwdrivers to tease out flat-head screws. Imagine living through brain events like the one I’m describing, and having no language to account for it. I had come to think I was unfixable.

At least now I can talk about being in shutdown, for it to be meaningful to me and the people around me. Just having that language has changed my response. This state of being - however unpleasant - is now a known quantity, an experience I share with many of my friends. It is no longer frightening to me. When it used to land, smothering me like a blanket, my mind would have no choice but to confabulate reasons for this disruption. That felt a lot like panic, like being under attack, and I would react accordingly, fighting against it for as long as I could, and then losing my shit spectacularly at some point, when I could no longer exercise the extreme level of self control that it took to pretend to be functioning while my cognition faltered. 

I can now name that, too: a meltdown. A lot of people think that meltdowns are autism, but they are not. A meltdown is what happens when a person is pushed past their point of overwhelm and into a place where only defence exists. You see it in non-autistic people too, when they’re pushed too far; it’s just that, for us, that point is more easily found in the chaos of the everyday. Either way, it feels like a blanking of the self, not so much a loss of control as a complete dislocation from it. It’s a similar state to the one I’m in now, except that I’ve been able to tell the people around me: enough. It seems to me that the difference between meltdowns and shutdowns is safety. I trust the people around me to meet my needs in this truly vulnerable moment. I can quietly reboot.

What gets me here? Nothing that you’d probably expect. It’s incremental, really: lots of little things to do. Things that can’t be captured and stored anywhere, that need me to constantly react in real time, things that can’t be tucked away on my list while I process them. A multitude of small demands, coming at me from all angles, and the problem is that I am not very good at forgetting. Everything that comes into my mind gets lodged there until it’s solved, even if it’s not my job to solve it. I think of these as open loops, and they clutter at the front of my brain until they are closed.

Work tasks are open loops. Domestic chores. Governmental crises playing out over the news. Concern for people I know. Birthday cards, pumpkins for Halloween, Christmas looming, school bake sales, PE kit on Thursdays and cat litter running out. The fact that we all have to eat breakfast, every single day, and lunch, and dinner too. I do my best to minimise the open loops, but sometimes there are too many, and they can’t be closed. At that point, people begin to chase me for the loops that they’ve already opened, and that creates a whole new set of loops, made sharp by guilt. The more there are, the more I slow down. The loops take on an air of menace. Eventually, they block out the light. 

I have lost so much from times like these: friendships, jobs, whole years of good health. I am, all at once, agonisingly conscientious, and deeply unreliable. I am capable of achieving incredible things, and also of not even being able to feed myself sometimes, often within the same week. I work nowadays with the most astonishing people who can sustain extraordinary effort and attainment across whole decades, and I feel horrible that I can’t keep up with them. Every now and then, someone will pop up online to tell me that I’m privileged for being able to rest at all, and it stings.

Because it’s not a choice; it’s a visitation. I can’t do things any other way. I have a hidden disability - carefully, stoically hidden, even from myself most of the time. One of the ways that we sideline disabled people is by telling them that they are wallowing in luxury - or being lazy - when they try to meet their basic needs. Many times, I’ve pushed on through obvious signals of burnout in order to avoid this judgement falling on me. It has very real consequences - physical, economic, psychological.

But even when I do try to communicate that my brain is about to hit a full stop, it is very hard to make myself clear. In some despair, I asked an autistic friend last week whether she manages to make people understand that she is burning out and in need of some solitude for a while. I tell them I’m unwell, she said. It seems to work.

When I was at school, we were sent for a few lessons with a self-defence teacher, who taught us many things. Aim for the balls, he said. That means eyeballs too. He showed us how to break someone’s nose with the heel of our hand, how to throw an attacker over our shoulder. But the thing that stuck with me the most was the entreaty to never shout ‘Help!’ because no-one will come. He said we should always shout ‘Fire!’ instead. Fire is something that people understand. Saying I’m sick feels a little like shouting ‘Fire!’, and I don’t want to do it anymore. I am not sick today. I am in a state for which we don’t yet share a language, or an understanding. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.

I will be fine. I will take things easy for a couple of days. I’ll think with my hands and feet for a while - walking and cooking - to give my poor brain a rest. I’ll reflect on what I can do to ease the burden a little more. New systems will be put in place. New habits will be formed. Some things will have to go. 

But for once, I wanted to write from the middle of it, this all-encompassing static. I’m still trying to explain myself, I suppose. Moreover, I’m trying to explain us, all the people who stutter into silence, who disappear from view, who are flaky and inconsistent, who don’t seem to put in the effort. We are busy falling between the impossible binary of keeping up with an accelerating world, and satisfying the people who want it to be a privilege not to work yourself into complete destruction. We are busy trying to invent a way to survive. This is the best witness I can make. 

Live dates & workshops

Bookshop event: Little Green Book Shop, Herne Bay, 18th November 2022, 18.00 - 19.30. As we settle into the dark half of the year, I’ll be in conversation about Wintering. Book here.

I’m speaking with The Ramblers Association on the 9th November 2022, 18.00 - 19:30. Book here.

At the Rookery…

I’ve had the pleasure of running live Patreon sessions with both Elissa Altman and Sarah Krasnostein in the last couple of weeks. Sarah talked about The Believer, her very personal encounter with the nature of faith in this divided age. It was magical to hear more about her relationship with Annie, Lynn and Loisann. Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions. 

Elissa joined us for our monthly hangout, and we talked about cookbooks, the trials of a long publishing career, and Elissa’s brief stint on QVC. I love these relaxed sessions!m

I’m excited to announce that the next The True Stories Book Club pick will be Hagitude by Sharon Blackie, which I know many of you already love. I’ll be talking to Sharon on Saturday 19th November -  do join us live if you can. We’re already collecting your questions on the Rookery page.

The Rookery is a great place to spend time with your favourite writers. Join our wonderful, lively community here.

That’s all for now. I’m doing my best to take a break this week while my brain remembers how to function again.

Take care,

Katherine

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