“When you think about ADHD . . . do you picture a woman in the bucolic English countryside, raising her children along with an assortment of animals and vegetables? Why not?”—Salon
Moving to a small farm is Rebeca Schiller’s dream come true. But as her young family adjusts to a new life in the countryside, her dream is threatened by something within. I'm aware of everything, all at once, which is too much. As Rebecca’s symptoms mount—frequent falls, rages, and strange lapses in memory—her doctors are baffled and her family unmoored.
Finally comes a diagnosis: severe ADHD. For Rebecca, it is the start, not the end, of a quest for understanding. As she scrambles to support both family and farm, her focus spirals: from our current climate crisis to long-extinct lynx in the shadows of ancient oaks and the forgotten women who tended this land before her, their stories hidden just beneath the surface of history.
In this luminous, heralded memoir of one woman’s newfound neurodivergence, attention is not deficient—but abundant.
ISBN-13: 9781615199426
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: The Experiment
Publication Date: 03-28-2023
Pages: 320
Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(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
