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.
Here we chat with Rebecca about her journey to that Adult ADHD diagnosis and beyond as shared in her new memoir,
A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind.
Q: Your memoir is the open and honest telling of your own journey through mental health crisis to an eventual diagnosis of neurodivergence told through the framework of daily life on your family’s small holding in Kent. It is a true story, written in the moment as it was happening, but you also employ elements of poetry and prose and bits of fiction as you write. How did this style of creative non-fiction come about?
Rebecca Schiller: Much of the book was written during the first six months of the pandemic – often as personally difficult events unfolded. It was already an unusual and fast-paced piece of writing, and the events in the outside world, my diagnosis and the logistics of writing during a global lockdown with my children unexpectedly at home meant that everything about the writing process felt challenging and outside of the norm.
Though it was intense and difficult, this strangeness and the emergency feeling around the writing created its own kind of energy. With everything so up in the air, nothing seemed out of bounds or off the table and the only way to write the book was to follow my instincts, allow my neurodivergent mind to be in charge and take creative risks that matched the very risk of writing the book itself. I experimented and was lucky enough to be working with editors who encouraged me to do that and trusted me to find a range of ways to let the writing in the book mirror how it felt to be in my head – and in the world – at the time.
Q: How did you decide to move your family from the city to a small holding in Kent? Was life in the countryside what you expected it to be?
RS: Our move was both an impulsive decision and something that had been a lifetime in the making. The decision was made in 2016, after a summer of working away from home, with my family, in the countryside, and removed from the usual distractions (of the town, cell phone reception and the internet). Noticing how much calmer and happier I felt, how connected we were as a family and how little we missed the things we had left behind, we resolved to try and find a way to make our lives more like this every day.
But I had also always found solace in nature and animals as a child and teenager. I now realize this was a protective factor for me as an undiagnosed neurodivergent person. Though studying, working and becoming a mother had made me forget this, as my responsibilities grew and – unbeknownst to me at the time – my mental health worsened, and the wider political situation and environmental emergency began to feel closer to home, I turned back to the familiarity of the land looking for something to hold onto, space to breath, reasons to move my body and enough stimulation to give my busy mind enough to stop it turning in on itself.
Q: Throughout your book, you describe instances of gradual breakdown—intense bouts of anger, smashed dishes, inability to be in the moment or stay still. How did you come to understand that these events could be symptoms of something deeper?
RS: It wasn’t until I stumbled on an article written by 10 women living with ADHD in late 2019 that I had any inkling that living with undiagnosed neurodivergence might be the reason my mental health had crumbled and my ability to cope had diminished. Reading the experiences of others who had masked their symptoms, been ashamed of their traits and found ways to mitigate them (using extreme effort, complicated systems and just trying very hard at absolutely everything) was a revelation. Once I had researched more – my neurodivergent capacity to hyperfocus on a subject and task coming in very handy at the time – I could see many ways that ADHD was playing a role in both the difficult and the positive things about the way I lived, thought and related to the world.
Since then it has been an ongoing process of working out how to live comfortable without shame and with acceptance in a world designed by and for neurotypical people, where some of the results of my neurodivergent thinking are welcomed and praised, but my way of being, and the process of getting to them, is often misunderstood, criticized, rendered invisible or seen as abnormal and something I should be working harder and trying harder to improve upon.
Q: How did your life change once you finally received an ADHD diagnosis? Did the diagnosis make you think about your daily life, interactions with family and friends in a different way?
RS: In many ways, it was my own self-diagnosis that was the most meaningful part of the diagnostic process for me. Both that and the later confirmation from a psychiatrist, after interviews and tests, began the process of allowing me to begin to notice the things in life that were difficult, uncomfortable, effortful or even torturous for me – as well as attempt to do what the doctor had advised and find a way to love myself a little more.
For me and many others I have spoken to, it is not an easy, fast or uncomplicated process. I have had to stare right at aspects of myself that I have spent my life being ashamed of. I have had to accept that characteristics I had thought were my key natural strengths were actually layers of masking and coping strategies. Postdiagnosis has been revelatory, incredibly helpful and also intense, difficult and traumatic. Specialist trauma therapy has helped.
I am now beginning to find ways to make life easier and more possible, be compassionate to myself without denying the reality of who I am, on the way my complicated brain works. Above anything else, being able to explain why and how I feel and behave the way I do has changed so much for me.
Q: The animals, plants, and landscapes of your home serve to illuminate your experience as you tumble toward an understanding of your neurodivergence, but also as a balm for the feelings that overwhelm as you live through that discovery. How is nature an important tool for understanding your ADHD, and coping with its effects?
RS: As I discovered while researching A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention, the term neurodivergent itself comes from how we understand and talk about the natural world. In nature, there is never a monolithic way of being: every species is full (and deliberately so) of diversity. Talking about neurodivergence is a way of resisting the idea that humans are outside of nature, and that there is a single correct way for our brains to work.
There is plenty of evidence that just being outside in nature, having the time to notice small changes as the seasons progress, is good for our bodies, lowers stress and declutters our minds – whether we are neurodivergent or not. Working my homestead means that I have to go outside every day, no matter what. It gives me a reason to notice things and a mandate for moving my restless body and engage in repetitive tasks – like weeding and sweeping – that seem to free my mind to think in its most natural and least anxious way.
It has not been easy, or a simple fix. The land I work has also been a cause of stress, overwhelm and tension in my family, but ultimately it is a great privilege to be a caretaker of small slice of the natural world and helpful to find my own daily struggles put into context, the sense that things always change, nothing is static and the reminder spring comes again, reinforced on a daily basis.
Q: You have an incredible imagination that manifests in the book as beautiful bits of fiction enhancing your own story. You also seem to have an ability to focus intensely on specific projects like sowing seeds or hatching chicks—are these coping mechanisms, signs of a special talent, both?
RS: The way my brain works – hyperfocusing on things I am interested in, spotting patterns, following research links down rabbit holes, propelled by an instinct that connections are there to be found and looking for a way to make this vast and expensive collection of thoughts, feelings and desires feel manageable, sensible and whole – isn’t a symptom, a superpower or a coping mechanism: it is just how I am.
I have always been and thought like this and, now that I am aware that ADHD is a factor for me, I can understand why. This knowledge has given me freedom to trust those instincts, find ways to manage the downsides of them – compensate in the days after exhausting hyperfocus by trying to find my own way to rest, and understanding the level of intense discomfort for me when I haven’t made the links join up yet and I’m constantly distracted by the need to. I’m so grateful for my imagination and how it has brought to life the women of my land’s past and future, who I now take genuine comfort from as I walk the earth they once stood on.
Q: Do you have any advice for others who might be on a similar journey: setting out to undertake a small holding or homestead; writing a book based on personal experience; receiving an unexpected diagnosis?
RS: I have a hunch that, even when they request it, few people really want advice. I think instead we often want somebody to listen and help us find our own way to spot the opportunities and get through the challenges. TI would encourage anyone else taking on big project – following a dream, making an impulsive decision, uprooting themselves or throwing themselves into something brand-new – to find their own ways to remember that what they are doing is brave and honest and difficult, so that when they are tired, afraid and feel defeated, they don’t wonder why.
Traditional advice would be to start small, not expect to do too much at once, focus on one thing and then the next, and make sure to take time to meditate or relax on the sofa. But I know that such advice, when given to me, was often counter-productive. It assumed that my way of being, of doing things, and the different ways I was inclined to rest, were inherently problematic; that if I could only find a way to achieve in a more predictable, slower, consistent way, I would discover that there was nothing to worry about and that stress was all my own making.
That wasn’t true for me. The ways that some neurotypical people think and work, make progress (or not), even the way they are encouraged to see resting – always as doing less, doing nothing, switching off – are things are very difficult for me to do and stressful because of that.
If you are thinking of doing something that others think is too much, too crazy or inexplicable, then the only advice I would give is to listen to yourself – really listen to yourself – not to them. Many of the internal voices I heard telling me how to do things, being critical and causing internal conflict, weren’t really my voice; they were what I had taken in from a lifetime of living in a world I didn’t realize that I didn’t fit into. Underneath all that was my natural way of being – far from perfect, definitely a lifetime’s work in progress, but the only way that I can live and be. Find your way to live and be.
Interview with Rebecca Schiller, author of A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind (The Experiment, April 2022). www.theexperimentpublishing.com
