A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention

A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind

By: Rebecca Schiller

Narrated by: Rebecca Schiller

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 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 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.

©2021 Rebecca Schiller (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Essentially wordy at times

Wordy at times, but I find it to be essential to fully capture her experience. I've never felt more understood. Brilliantly written!

Understood beyond measure

While many might read this book and find it wordy, all over the place, and disorganized….. my brain thrived on it. My heart ached in her moments of shame. So deeply understood and suddenly making me feel less alone in the everyday struggle of neurodivergence in a very neurotypical world. I want to hug the author for her pain through discovery and the authenticity of the path.