A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention

February 28, 2022
In this exquisite and probing narrative, Guardian contributor Schiller (Your No Guilt Pregnancy Plan) candidly charts her experience with ADHD while embarking on a quest to live off the land. As Britain’s desiccated moors blazed in 2017, Schiller and her husband’s fantasies of raising their family “a little closer to the earth” became urgent. Finding their rural idyll on a two-acre homestead outside of London, the couple seeded vegetable beds, planted fruit trees, and built animal sheds. Schiller richly evokes the delights of living in the countryside—harvesting “blackberries from the hedges” and “putting the goats to bed”—but reveals that her bucolic retreat was soon disrupted by a “tangle of energy, certainty, ambition... anger” that made her “unable to sit still, to speak slowly, or make decisions.” From here, the narrative spirals into looking-glass territory as Schiller vividly recreates manic bouts of research propelled by her agitation and rising awareness of the climate crisis—“of the heat raging in the Amazon and of other forests being lost.” When she discovers that ADHD could be partially responsible for her violent fits, Schiller refuses to let the label end her self-inquiry, instead using it to explore the wonders that arise from being different. By eschewing tidy resolutions, Schiller’s work offers a complex look into a beautiful mind.