A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: Discovering the Beauty of My ADHD Mind--A Memoir

In this "exquisite and probing narrative" (Publishers Weekly) of life on her small farm in the year leading up to a surprising diagnosis of severe ADHD, Rebecca Schiller pens a vivid rallying cry for anyone wondering if different doesn't have to mean broken

It should have been Rebecca Schiller's dream come true: moving her young family to the English countryside to raise goats and coax their own fruit and vegetables from the land. But, as she writes: The summer of striding out toward a life of open fields and sacks of corn, I brought a confused black hole of something pernicious but not yet acknowledged along for the ride.

Rebecca's health begins to crumble, with bewildering symptoms: frequent falls, uncontrollable rages, and mysterious lapses in memory. As she fights to be seen by a succession of specialists, her fledgling homestead--and her family--hang by increasingly tenuous threads. And when her diagnosis finally comes, it is utterly unexpected: severe ADHD.

In her scramble for answers, Rebecca's consciousness alternately sears with pinpoint focus and spirals with connections. Childhood memories resurface with new meaning, and her daily life entwines with the history of intrepid women who tended this land before her. Her family weathers their growing pains where generations of acorns have fallen to rise again as trees, where ancient wolves and lynx once stalked the shadows.

Written in unsparing, luminous prose, this is an all-absorbing memoir of one woman's newfound neurodivergence--and a clarion call to overturn the narrative that says minds are either normal and good or different and broken.

Publisher's Note: A different version of this book has been published under the title Earthed in the United Kingdom.

ISBN-13: 9781615198801

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: The Experiment - LLC

Publication Date: 04-26-2022

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 5.80(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

Rebecca Schiller is cofounder and trustee of the human rights organization Birthrights and a regular contributor to The Guardian. She is also the author of Your No Guilt Pregnancy Plan and the children’s book Amazing Activists Who Are Changing Our World. On their small homestead in the English countryside, Rebecca and her family raise a motley crew of goats, geese, ducks, and chickens, and grow vegetables, fruit, and flowers to restore wildlife to the land. She lives in Kent, UK.

Table of Contents

February 2020 1

Part 1 Spring 2019

January: I Fall 13

February: Beginnings 31

March: Fragmentation 49

April: Black Holes 63

Part 2 Summer 2019

May: Mapmaking 83

June: I Dissolve 101

July: A Puritan Lady 119

August: Eye Opening 137

Part 3 Autumn-Winter 2019

September: The Deadening Cloak 153

October: Riot / Protest 167

November: Ideas Do Not Fall from the Sky 185

December: The Mind Scrambler 203

Part 4 The Next Season 223

Author's Note 288

Acknowledgements 290

The Missing Women 292

About the Author 296

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