The sharp scrutiny of midsummer

A revolutionary reimagining is taking place this solstice

Jun 15, 2023

Briefly: Sign up to the Retreat tier to join our digital gathering on Saturday June 17th | Kerri ní Dochartaigh on How We Live Now - and read Kerri’s lovely newsletter about our conversation | Last call for my midsummer event on Exmoor with Seven Fables Dulverton

I realised earlier this week that we were nearly at the summer solstice. It crept up on me this time, hidden behind a cold and blustery May. I fretted over my garden as nothing grew, and summer felt far away. But here we are now: a half-turn has happened since the last extreme, when it seemed like the light might never return.

Much has happened in that half-turn, and now there is nothing but light. I find the midsummer sun strange, a hot, piercing eye that stares into me as I walk along the beach each night. It insinuates its way behind the curtains as I go to bed, and it shakes me awake each morning with its unruly choir of birds. I do not entirely like this sun and its sharp scrutiny. It always incites something or other, a restless sedition, a rush towards change. It writhes in me, overdue. I have no choice but to ready myself for its quickening.

At midsummer I am usually in a frenzy of ideas, riding a wild, surging wave of creative yearning. This year is different. The wave is bigger than I am, and I feel overcome by it, engulfed. I keep telling people that I’m a little overwhelmed, as if I have ever been capable of a simple whelming in the first place. This one is more powerful than that. I wish I could read it as it rolls towards me. All I can see from here is a mass of cycles coming to a close - long-lived beliefs and ways of being, all ending at once. It feels catastrophic, terrifying. It feels raw and real. It feels a lot like necessary work.

Every seven years, a friend told me yesterday, everything changes. We are fond of saying that the body replaces all its cells in seven years, making a whole, new person, and it’s not entirely a myth. Every seventh wave is supposed to advance the tide. So I counted back seven years and found myself at the last revolution in my life, newly identified as autistic, reeling and grieving and collapsed in gratitude at what this new self-knowledge could bring me. That one was a tidal wave, an explosive seventh. I can’t imagine another quite so big again.

In the wake of that last wave, I built a new scaffolding to hold my life together, a new way of seeing myself and understanding my needs. Over seven years, that scaffold has tattered and decayed, and it no longer props me up any more. Is that what happens in all of our lives: we improvise a series of rickety structures that can only ever hold for a while? I can see the flaws in that scaffold now: the way that it relieved me of one way of masking discomfort in the world - rage - only to give me a different mask. I switched from fight to flight. I didn’t learn to address my own needs so much as to avoid incurring them in the first place.

Those seven years ago, I confronted an uncomfortable truth that I was not the sociable, outgoing person I’d always believed myself to be, but instead someone who found social life bruising and bewildering. I allowed myself to see that other people found me too brash, too direct; that the noisy performance of humanity that I thought covered my tracks was repellent in itself. I allowed myself to see that I couldn’t face the outside world sober, that I was medicating against my own self-loathing in ways that were not keeping me well. I desperately, desperately needed that wave to come and wash it all away.

But, my God, that was a painful time. I walked away from friendships that were built on the flow of booze and noise. I politely absorbed everyone’s feedback about how strange they’d always found me anyway. Now we all knew why! Lucky us! Now we knew. A lot of it came to feel like a punishment beating, meted out by people who had no corresponding obligation to admit their own flaws, their own strangenesses. And what was I now, with it all stripped away? I didn’t know. I felt like a void without the old skin I’d worn to feel safe.

I had never been all that socially anxious before, but now I was, because I could no longer trust the impact I’d have on a room of people. I learned to be absent, literally staying away or turning up and staying quiet. It seemed like a calmer way to live, more steady. But I missed people, and as they gradually learned not to invite me in the first place, I was hurt. I thought that maybe this was the best balance I could strike. It was a painful one.

And yet at the same time, something else was shifting. People began to like my work - to really like it. Not to find it clever and promising like they used to, but to respond to it with a full-hearted fervour that made me feel as though the ground was crumbling under my feet. I didn’t know what to do with this response. Even when these people saw my difficulties, they mirrored back compassion instead of distaste. They began to stop me in the street to tell me that my work meant everything to them, and left messages to tell me I was wonderful. I should have enjoyed this, but I didn’t. It made me writhingly, bitterly uncomfortable. It seemed to me that some kind of mistake was being made, a conflation of me and my work, and their response to it. Their part was the magical part. It was not my doing. I tried to explain this, but it did nothing to make it stop. A sense of unreality overtook me: this was not happening. It was a mirage that would dissipate at some point, and I must absolutely not learn to trust it, let alone to adapt to it, because it would all go away when people realised.

I hated being seen as a wise person when I’d actually written about being a mess. I wanted to apologise for taking up people’s time, and I carefully accommodated everyone’s needs but my own.

That did not create the protective bubble I thought it would. It just made everything hard. Life was full of nasty, maladaptive surprises. I hated being seen as a wise person when I’d actually written about being a mess. I wanted to apologise for taking up people’s time, and I carefully accommodated everyone’s needs but my own. People said how easy I was to work with, and something about that ground against me. It felt a little like a warning: be good. Don’t ask too much. Don’t make trouble. I believed it, and I let people overrun my boundaries on countless occasions because I didn’t want to be seen as difficult. I made space for everything except my actual writing. Strange as it sounds, writing still seemed to me to be an indulgence, rather than the centre of everything I did.

The change, when it came, seemed to land in me all at once. It came as exhaustion and confusion, as a kind of bewildered grief. It came as my body saying enough while my mind scrambled to make sense of it. It came as a sudden certainty that denying my success was in fact just gracelessness. It came as a vision of roots growing downward instead of branches growing upward, not of reaching but of anchoring. It came as a sense, for the first time in my life, that I didn’t want to escape this thing that overwhelmed me, but that instead I wanted to learn how to calm it.

That seventh year is generational. There are so many late-diagnosed neurodivergent people like me, stumbling toward the seventh - or fifth, or third - year of getting to know ourselves, and we’re making our way without any model for a happy life. We are in the process of giving each other permission, but we don’t yet truly know what that permission grants. We’re making our mistakes in public and in private, and hoping that at some point we’ll find a way of living that doesn’t feel horrible. We’re disheartened by how hard it is, and we’re inspired to take the hard route anyway. We’re building that scaffolding, a little better this time, a little more stable, a little more flexible. In seven years or so, it will collapse again. But at least it will have got us a little higher than before.

The solstice will pass next week. I’ll be greeting the sunrise by swimming in the sea, and waiting on the beach with friends until the last sliver of sun dips below the horizon. I know from experience that the fever will begin to recede, and the disconcerting spirit of revolution will slowly dissipate. I am hoping that something will shift, that I’ll be able to breathe again without the air catching in my chest. But the change it has set in train will not clear away so easily. The next seven years will begin.

Coming up at The Clearing

Events for paid subscribers

Saturday 17th June, 4pm - 7pm UK Digital Retreat (The Retreat tier only).

There’s still time to upgrade if you’d like to join us - go to katherinemay.substack.com/account and select ‘upgrade to paid’ or change your plan to ‘Retreat’.

If you’re in need of the the retreat and are unable to afford the membership, we’re giving away some free places - please email theclearing@katherine-may.com with the subject line ‘Saturday Retreat’ before 12pm UK time on Friday 16th June. No message required - we’ll pick at random. To ensure that these places go to those who need them, we ask that you only apply if you’re unable to afford an membership and don’t treat this as a competition or giveaway. This place runs on trust and kindness!

Monday 19th June, 7pm UK Creative Questions

I’ll be choosing two of your questions about creative life - from writing concerns to career advice to mindset shifts - for a live coaching session. Joining me on screen is optional! I’ll be putting a call for questions in the chat.

Meet Rebecca

I’m beyond thrilled to introduce you to Rebecca Armstrong, who will be editing this newsletter from now on (aka quelling my natural tendency towards chaos and lazy final paragraphs). She’s the former Features Editor of the i paper and The Independent, and has given up the day job to study art - you can see some of her work here and here. You may also know her from The Wintering Sessions, where she talked about going sober, or from my retreats, where she has a knack of handing out tissues at exactly the right time. I’m sure you’ll see her around.

I am, as ever, so grateful for the help of a team of people who keep me afloat.

Live dates

Saturday 24th June, 6pm UK Seven Fables, Dulverton. Tickets available here.

Tuesday 15th August, 5pm - 6pm UK, A Natural Harbour at Edinburgh Book Festival. Tickets available here.

Wednesday 16th August, 11:45am - 12:45pm UK Wildest Dreams with Kerri ní Dochartaigh at Edinburgh Book Festival. Tickets available here.