A reflection on Katherine May’s “Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age”
There’s a quote from Katherine May’s Enchantment that I haven’t been able to shake: “There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.”
I read that and felt seen in a way that made me uncomfortable. Because yes—I have been running. And I didn’t even realize it until I stopped long enough to read this book.
The Fog
May opens Enchantment describing a kind of exhaustion that defies easy categorization. Not quite depression (though she knows that territory well), not quite burnout (though that’s closer). It’s something more insidious—a flattening of experience, a brain that “glances off everything, a pale beam.”
When I read her words—”I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. It’s nothing, but it’s also all-encompassing”—I wanted to underline every sentence. Print it out. Show it to my therapist of ten years and say, “This. This is what I mean when I can’t find the words.”
I’ve been in therapy for a decade now. I’ve learned so many tools for managing my chronic depression, for naming my anxiety, for surviving the panic attacks that emerged during particularly unsafe times at work. I’ve healed from intimate partner violence at 19. I’ve processed childhood trauma. I’ve done the work, as they say.
And yet. There’s still this… unmoored feeling. This sense that something fundamental is missing, even when I’ve found what should be my purpose.
The Purpose That Wasn’t Enough
A month ago, I was grieving the sudden end of a ten-year friendship. The kind of loss that makes you question your worth—to the people in your life, to life in general. Dangerous thoughts for someone with my history of depression.
But I had my anchor: I’d recently decided to switch careers, to leave law behind and become a certified victim advocate. It felt right in a way few things ever have. I want to be for others what I wish someone had been for me at 19—present, believing, supportive. I value kindness, compassion, healing. This was my calling, and throwing myself into the training was revitalizing.
Last week, I was certain of this purpose. More certain than I’d been of anything in months.
Today? My resolve has faltered.
Not because I don’t believe in the work. Not because it doesn’t align with my values. But because I’m starting to realize that even the most meaningful purpose might not be all there is. May writes about “a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making.” And I feel that. Even with purpose. Even with healing.
What Enchantment Is (And Isn’t)
Here’s what this book won’t give you: a roadmap. A five-step plan. A guarantee that if you do X, Y, and Z, you’ll feel whole again.
May structures Enchantment around the elements—earth, water, fire, air—and takes us through her own attempts to reconnect: beekeeping, swimming in the sea, chasing meteor showers, tending a wild garden. She’s searching for what she calls “small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.”
Some readers found this frustrating. They wanted more instruction, less memoir. They wanted the book to deliver on the promise of its subtitle: “Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age.” How do we do that? they asked.
But I think May’s refusal to prescribe is the point. She writes: “seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty.”
This isn’t a checklist. It’s a practice. And practices are personal.
The Window Stays Open
Even as I write this, my office window is open. The forecast says storms are coming, and I’m waiting to hear them, smell them, feel them roll in. I do this often—keep the window open when everyone else turns on the air conditioning. I garden, even though my results are wild and imperfect. I sit in the sun to feel its warmth when I can.
These are small things. Hardly revolutionary. But reading May’s book made me realize they matter more than I’d acknowledged. Not because they’re going to “fix” my depression or erase my trauma or make grief disappear. But because they’re evidence of something—a tether to the world when my brain threatens to flatten everything into gray.
May writes about burnout as “an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.” For her, it came from years of masking her autism, of ignoring her sensory needs. For me, it’s come from constant vigilance—from years of watching over my shoulder, even when the immediate danger passed.
“Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm,” May writes. “It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder.”
Twenty years after leaving my abusive partner, I’m still learning to stop watching. Still learning that the chemical cocktail of hypervigilance doesn’t just discharge on its own. You have to find ways to release it—or it channels into anxiety, hopelessness, anger. Or in my case, into work. Into purpose. Into running toward the next thing that will make me feel worthwhile.
The Discomfort of Being Seen
There’s something unsettling about reading a book that describes your interior landscape so precisely. It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that other people feel these things. It’s another to read sentences that could have come from your own journal.
Enchantment made me feel both incredibly understood and nervous about my own recovery. If May—who has done her own healing work, who has built a life by the sea, who has found ways to reconnect with nature and community—still feels this unmoored, this hungry for meaning… what does that say about the rest of us?
But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the point isn’t to “arrive” at some permanent state of enchantment. Maybe it’s to keep looking, even when—especially when—the looking feels futile.
May writes: “I want to be enchanted again.” Not “I want to have been enchanted.” Not “I want to remember enchantment.” But to be enchanted, present tense, ongoing.
A Framework for Navigating
As I was sitting with these questions, a recent newsletter from the Arizona Trauma Institute landed in my inbox. It discussed something called the Sense of Coherence—a concept from salutogenesis (the study of what creates health, rather than what causes disease). The framework describes three elements that help us navigate life’s challenges:
Comprehensibility: Can I understand what’s happening? Can I recognize patterns instead of seeing only chaos?
Manageability: Do I have resources—internal or external—to handle this? Can I shift from “I am powerless” to “I have tools and support”?
Meaningfulness: Does this matter? Can I find purpose even in the struggle?
Reading this felt like finding the missing piece. May’s book is essentially about the loss and recovery of these three elements. When she describes feeling “empty” and “unmoored,” when she writes about that “vast unsettled sense that I am slipping over the glassy surface of things”—she’s describing what happens when we lose our Sense of Coherence.
The world stopped making sense (comprehensibility). The usual tools stopped working (manageability). And worst of all, nothing felt like it mattered enough (meaningfulness).
Her search for enchantment? It’s a search for coherence. For a way to make sense of the world again, to find resources in nature and community, and to reconnect with what makes life worth living.
And here’s what struck me: my own moment of faltering—questioning whether my purpose was enough—was actually me losing that third element. I had comprehensibility (I understood what was happening with the friendship loss, with my career transition). I had manageability (therapy, tools, support systems). But in that moment, I’d lost touch with meaningfulness. The “why” felt shaky.
The framework helped me see that these fluctuations aren’t failures. They’re normal. And more importantly, they’re navigable.
The Storm Came
I wrote most of this post yesterday, sitting at my desk with the window open, waiting for the storm the forecast promised. I was in that unmoored place—questioning whether purpose alone was enough, feeling the weight of uncertainty that comes with major life changes. These fluctuations are normal, I know. When you’re considering something as significant as a career change, existential questions are part of the package.
But yesterday, I was gentle with myself. I let the feelings exist without trying to fix them. I allowed myself to really reflect on May’s message.
And then the storm finally rolled in.
I went home. I sat on my covered porch on my rocking bench, wrapped myself in a wool shawl, poured a glass of red wine. And I stayed there—listening to the hard rain pour, watching the wind gust through the trees, hearing my windchime play its loud and noisy symphony.
I didn’t check my phone. I didn’t make a to-do list. I didn’t think about what comes next.
I just sat with the storm. Let myself be one with it.
And I felt it—that thing May writes about. That “tingle on the border of our perception.” That sense of being “joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth.”
I felt enchanted.
Getting Back to the Work
I woke up this morning with more energy. More clarity. The determination to be someone who helps others, who stands up for victims and makes sure their voices are heard—it’s back. It didn’t disappear; it was just momentarily obscured by the fog of transition and grief and the normal human experience of wondering if you’re on the right path.
This book didn’t give me a roadmap, and the storm didn’t solve my problems. But May was right about this: “seeking is a kind of work.” Not the work of constantly doing, but the work of noticing. Of stopping. Of allowing yourself to discharge that constant vigilance, even if just for an hour on a porch in the rain.
The window is still open. The storm has passed, but I’m different for having sat with it. Still here. Still looking. Still committed to the good work.
That’s enough. That’s everything.
Have you read Enchantment? What books have found you at exactly the right (or wrong) moment? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.