THE SUNDAY REVIEW | A THOUSAND WAYS TO PAY ATTENTION – REBECCA SCHILLER

Minds that work differently are seen as outliers – and that’s if they’re seen at all. Those of us who are neurodivergent (especially those of us who aren’t aware of that important piece of our identity) spend our lives being told we are – in various ways – not right. We don’t fit in, we don’t keep up, we can’t do things other people find easy, we take effort to be around. We try to fit ourselves into the shape of who those around us want us to be, but that constant contortion takes a massive toll. For many of us the cost of doing this for decades leaves us with other issues – mental health being the most common casualty, but even our bodies are caught in the vise.

Rebecca Schiller’s memoir is a beautiful and at times shocking account of what it can look like when someone in this situation finally hits their limit and just can’t keep it up any longer. In Schiller’s case her symptoms were extreme – she had memory lapses, physical issues, and emotional outbursts that took everyone by surprise – especially her. Finally, finally, she is able to find the right medical professionals who diagnose her with severe ADHD. This was not what she expected, but it does provide the beginning of answers as to why she has been struggling so much, and for so long.

Though the book is, at its centre, about Schiller’s search for the missing piece of herself, the journey is tethered by her intense need to be connected to nature. Before everything started to fall apart she and her family had moved to a farm that they began to set up as a homestead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as she fell apart, her whole being yearned to be connected to not only the earth and plants and animals around her, but to the history of this place and all the women who had come before her doing exactly the same thing. These dual tethers served to hold her in place when she felt like she was falling apart, and also offered opportunities for self-reflection and healing.

I mostly loved this book. Her candor, her familiar struggles (as I discussed in this post, I myself have also been recently diagnosed with ADHD after decades of also having no idea what was wrong – and plenty of co-morbidities) and the confusion and overwhelm that accompanies knowing something is wrong, but not what or how to deal with it. My experience was not the same as hers – I didn’t have the same level of symptoms or the same ones, but there was enough overlap and a recognition of the place it stems from to feel that sense of seeing a part of my story on the page. All of this felt like a relief to read – partly because it proved that I’m not alone, but also because it’s now out there in the world, a story not too different from my own, that people can read and experience. And that is, in its own way, another relief to me.

The only part of the book I didn’t love was when she writes fictional histories of women throughout history. I understood why she included this – it was a her hyperfocus, learning about what women’s lives had been like, imagining them in their own times – but I found it didn’t add anything for me and I listened to them impatiently waiting to get back to the actual story. That said, I don’t think it was an issue to have them there, I just didn’t have the patience with the shifts or the interest to hold me. Most likely my own brain wiring at work. I think for most readers it will be an interesting set of tangents that add some texture to the story.

I really hope that this book finds its readers – women who are also struggling, who are lost and adrift, who feel like they are failing at life and who are fighting with everything they’ve got just to get through each day. And also those who love them, who might recognize some of what they have witnessed, and who may, through this account, be given the gift of understanding it a little better. This book is such a wonderful opportunity to do exactly what books are made for – share in someone else’s experience and feel as if it becomes, in some small way, a part of our own.

As propulsive as Brain on Fire and as poetically candid as The Collected Schizophrenias, one woman’s quest for the truth of her neurodivergent mind

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. – Goodreads

Book Title: A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention (also published in the UK as Earthed)
Author: Rebecca Schiller
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook/Paperback
Published By: The Experiment/Elliott & Thompson
Released: May 6, 2021
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Family, Mental Health, Neurodiversity, Late Diagnosis
Pages: 304
Date Read: July 4-6, 2023
Rating: 8/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.57/5 (537 ratings)