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

Now in paperback: A captivating, heralded memoir, "unflinching and full of truth" (Katherine May), of a woman making a home on a small farm while grappling with an unexpected ADHD diagnosis

“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.

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

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.