Bit of a non sequitur for the first post on here, but I’m not that great at the old linear thinking so here goes!
Let me talk you through my morning. I ran into a radiator while dodging two marauding kittens, I rammed my water bottle into my face so hard that I cut my lip, I somehow trapped my finger under the seat of a chair while sitting down into a café and now have a nail which is slowly, but surely going black… And all this is so normal for me that I barely noticed it.
Yesterday, I was diagnosed with dyspraxia… And I should probably mention that I was late to the assessment because I couldn’t find the room (despite the fact that it was in a building I used to work in). I did manage to bring the questionnaires I was meant to fill out beforehand, but they were crumpled, illegible and covered in the footprints of the afore-mentioned marauding kittens. By the time I actually met the assessor and started to answer his questions, the actual assessment had become an exercise in formality.
So yeah, I was diagnosed with a developmental disorder at age 30. And I felt… relief.
Stuff suddenly makes sense. Maybe it’s not all my fault – actual messages aren’t getting through to my actual body from my actual brain (can you tell I’m a psychologist from all those technical terms?!).
I have all the co-ordination things associated with dyspraxia - yes, Dad, I do have a ‘hole in my racket’ when I try to play tennis! – Home videos of me at tumble tots have the potential to make me a fortune on youtube. Let’s just say, I did an awful lot of tumbling and not that much… totting… Actually, what is one meant to do at Tumble Tots, other than tumble?! Maybe, I was technically very good at it…
My primary school advised my parents to send me to ballet classes aged 4 to help with co-ordination stuff. Displaying a well-developed instinct for self-preservation in the face of potential teasing, I refused. Only time I’ve ever refused any school activity (yes, I was that child). And then there was the problem of cartwheels. You see, when you’re an eight year-old girl, the ability to cartwheel (preferably one-handed) is your primary social currency. The most I could manage was a sort of lopsided bunny hop… And, why oh why, did only boys get to have Velcro on their school shoes?! To this day, I cannot tie my shoelaces properly.
I was also, unfortunately, the kind of child who quite liked to get stuck in. Sadly, in my case, that wasn’t a graceful leap into extracurricular activities, it was more like a fast and badly-timed bellyflop. Cue years of scraped knees and elbows, getting stuck in trees I’d managed to climb up, but could not climb down and falling into probably every river, pond or large puddle in Wiltshire. I particularly remember, my first ever trip to an ice skating rink ended before actually reaching the ice because I dropped a skate on my foot with rather nasty consequences.
Oddly enough, the one positive in this was swimming. I’ve always been able to swim and swim well. When I’m held up by the water, my body just becomes more…coherent somehow. Even now, when I’m stressed, I swim, when I’m sad, I swim, when I’m very happy, I swim. Preferably, outside.
As an adult, requests to do cartwheels are rare (but perhaps more regular than you might expect when you work in a child mental health team). I have learned to laugh at my dreadful dancing in clubs, my unexplained bruises and my abysmal tennis skills. Driving is a problem – I failed seven tests despite the very best efforts of a truly exceptional driving instructor (Ann, if you ever read this – thank you. No one else could have got me to eventually pass) – but, driving, I’ve found is largely avoidable and I’m alright in rural areas and situations where I don’t have to reverse around corners. My co-ordination problems don’t stop me from doing things.
What’s more of a problem, is the hidden side of dyspraxia, the bit no one really knows about. I am disorganised, I am messy, I have a comically poor sense of direction (seriously, I can get lost in my home town, inside buildings, on routes to friends’ houses which I have walked a thousand times previously). The person who invented google maps and made the moveable dot which tells you where you are is honestly one of the people I admire most in the world. Without it, I would get nowhere. And that’s not an exaggeration. When going to job interviews or catching plans, I sometimes set off two hours early to allow for ‘getting lost’ time.
While getting lost is just a fun quirk of my personality, chronic disorganisation is an actual problem. I’m a clinical psychologist (well, a trainee one) – day to day, I see people who are disclosing horrific trauma and battling internal demons most of us couldn’t even imagine. People who are an inspiration for their resilience in the face of overwhelming circumstances. And the most stressful aspect of my job? It’s not seeing those people – that’s a privilege – it’s booking rooms and putting appointments in my diary for the right times. Seriously. For me, that is a Herculean task, equal to fighting any hydra.
On my last clinical placement, I was lucky enough to work with two admin staff who went above and beyond to be helpful and supportive. They somehow sensed my areas of weakness without me having to say anything and made sure that my appointments were booked and my letters were sent. With their help, the stress of clinical work vanished and I could feel myself flourishing.
Where it’s a real problem for me, is research tasks. I somehow completed a PhD and found things like making sure that the right participant ID numbers were on the right questionnaires near impossible. And then there was that master’s debacle where I failed to record data for fifty participants by genuinely not seeing a box I was meant to tick on the EEG readout which read ‘save data’. Research is all about sequencing tasks and being methodical. Remember when I said I wasn’t a linear thinker? I meant it. For me, A will never lead to B. A leads to F and then to G via space and a brief tour of duty aboard the Starship Enterprise and then arrives at B. Give me a problem to solve and I will get there, not necessarily slower than anyone else, but I will get there in a way which maybe doesn’t make huge amounts of sense and might be harder than the tried and tested path.
To be honest, there are advantages to this. I am creative. I can generate novel solutions. I have a vivid imagination. My weird thought processes have engendered a love of creative writing, of theatre, of newness, of possibility, of anything wacky and wonderful. But it can be a problem in the world of research and I do need better coping strategies for my chronic disorganisation.
The upsides? I don’t take myself too seriously – after all, I fell flat on my face in front of twenty senior mental health professionals in my first ever multidisciplinary team meeting as a psychologist. Being a serious person was never going to work. I have learned to place value on the things I am good at. And I refuse to let poor co-ordination stop me from doing anything. Last year, I ran a half marathon. Sure, I ran it with arms and legs akimbo and with all the grace of an unusually enthusiastic puppy, but I ran it. And that’s what matters.
