#dyspraxicproblems

I mean... 

-There’s such an obsession with manners that no one actually says what they mean and they act like things are fine when they aren’t, because if they didn’t it would be Rude and Socially Unacceptable. So yeah... thanks, it’s hard enough to understand tone of voice, body language, and social convention anyway but sure, let’s turn everything into a bizarre theatre of pleasantries and give neurodivergent people an extra layer of encryption to decipher! Like, how am I supposed to tell the difference between “Yes that would be lovely!” and “Yes. That would be Lovely.” And then our parents tell us not to lie. What the actual? 

-Thanks to the good old Stiff Upper Lip, British people are forced to exist in a grey area of mediocrit. Like: ”I’m fine” apparently means “Everything is terrible” and “Not Bad” means “I’m so happy a little bit of wee came out”

- Sarcasm. The act of saying something when you mean the opposite, supposedly for comedic purposes. So even when British people aren’t being serious, they’re saying the opposite of what they mean. And they do the same “sarcastic joke” all the bloody time? “Lovely weather out there!” Apparently the appropriate response is “Absolutely glorious, isn’t it!” If you actually say what you mean, idk like “no it’s absolutely terrible I left the washing out and my shoes are muddy and my socks are wet and my hair is going to go poof” you get the Eye Roll because you Didn’t Understand The Joke, or if you take the joke further and say “yes it’s lovely I’m totally going for a swim in the sea later” only like 5% of British people will understand you’re continuing the joke, the remaining 95% will look at you with abject disapproval at the mere mention of extreme sports and nudity.

-Despite the deadpan expression and performative niceties, British people are never just a bit miffed if someone’s been a bit rude or annoying. They are incensed. Enraged! But of course, they won’t tell you this. That would be Rude. -If you don’t know the offender personally, (for instance if they are a shop assistant, waiter, bank teller, train conductor, chugger, Jehovah’s Witness, or the cat from two doors down who pood in your nasturtiums) you would be mistaken if you think the appropriate course of action is to ignore it and get on with your day, or to politely but assertively let them know that their conduct is inappropriate (Sound familiar, young neurodivergents?) Nope! What you should do, is write a Strongly Worded Letter.* * Strongly worded letter: an exercise in advanced sarcasm which challenges the Brit to cram as much passive aggression onto a page of A4 as humanly possible, and to let the offender know in no uncertain terms that the incident severely compromised the stiffness of your upper lip.

 -However, if the offender is known to the offendee (a relative, neighbour, housemate, mutual acquaintance) British people will drop subtle hints, like forgetting to put sugar in your tea when you explicitly asked for it, and then lecturing you that it’s not supposed to have sugar in it anyway. As if that isn’t rude. Another way to tell, is if they end an email with “Regards”. That means you’re in trouble! -Oh, I’m sorry! Did I not mention this one? There is a world of difference between “Kind Regards” and “Regards”. If the regards are kind, the person doesn’t give a sh*t about you. If the regards are neutral, you are literally Satan. And because you’re British, no one is going to sit you down and explain this, or let you know what you did to offend them, condemning you to forever being an unintentional and oblivious douchebag. (And knowing the British, your crime was probably that you put “regards” at the end of the email instead of “kind regards”)

Neurotypical friend: *has builders in the house making fucktons of noise with drills and hoovers and whatnot*

Also neurotypical friend: *whacks music volume up to cover up the noise*

As you can probably tell from my two previous posts, my life hasn’t been going great recently. Unfortunately most of these things are things that happened *to me* rather than things that were my own fault... however, because of my past, it doesn’t always feel that way.

I said a couple of posts ago that I would like to believe 100% that dyspraxia is a synonym for awesomeness, because that’s what this blog is about! I want to shift the focus from a difficulty to a different way of thinking. A way of thinking without which the world would not be as awesome as it is. A way of thinking without which YOU WOULD NOT BE AS AWESOME AS YOU ARE. And if there is one thing I know, there is nothing worse than sacrificing who you are for the sake of “fitting in” or “being normal”. 

This post is to reassure myself just as much as it is to reassure you. This is a post to celebrate awesome things I have in my life, not just because of my dyspraxia, but in spite of all the things people said I couldn’t do because they did not understand the way I was or how to relate to me. I’m going to provide some examples from my life and IF YOU GUYS THINK THERE IS SOMETHING FOR YOU TO SHARE PLEASE COMMENT, REBLOG, SHARE. LET’S FILL TUMBLR WITH DYSPRAWESOMENESS TODAY!!!

POSITIVE THING #1: My Home

This story has a very sad element but it doesn’t take away from the awesome that went into it. This story also includes my partner who has dyslexia and also a very similar creative mindset to me. We both have a passion for creating things; me, small pretty things, him, big practical things! We’ve taught each other a lot about each other’s art, and through his passion I’ve found one of mine: converting vehicles.

A year or so into our relationship my partner procured a VW Transporter. He made a bed, cupboard, and sink unit out of old wood palettes and discarded equipment from building sites. We went on holiday to the Isle of Wight in it and from then on we didn’t want to do anything else with our lives. If we could create a small space filled with creative storage solutions, hygenic, eco-friendly energy and waste disposal, and above all, things that we loved, we would be free. 

And we did it.

In the back of a Mercedes Sprinter we had a functioning composting toilet and shower facilities. We had a kitchen unit made from a writing desk we found in a skip. We had a log burner that doubled as a stove. We had a fold down table with a cabinet behind it and six little pull-out cupboards that took up sod all room and held lots of stuff. We had netting on the ceiling with things we needed hanging up. We had the bed on a raised platform with tons of storage space underneath. It was wonderful. We literally made our home with our own hands.

We don’t live there now because it was stolen before it was fully completed. But don’t let that be a downer on what I am trying to tell you.

We now live in a ready-made camper van that we did not have to convert. However, it does need a lot of work to turn it into a space that is safe for two people to live in permanently and not just for a holiday.

But if we managed to create a space like that out of a bare van, wood palettes, discarded furniture, NEURODIVERGENT THINKING, and a CAN DO/WILL DO MINDSET... WE CAN DO IT AGAIN. (and we need to do it fast because winter is coming and we actually don’t have another place to live) PLEASE REBLOG and share your own story: What aspect of your dyspraxia/autism/adhd/learning “difficulty” makes you awesome and helps you do awesome things???

POSITIVE THING #5: COLOURS

I <3 COLOURFUL THINGS.

I love really bright colours. When I was a baby, apparently I loved yellow things. When I was about 6 I liked pink a lot. When I was 10 I was enamoured by amethyst and turquoise colours. At 15, bright, electric blues and burning reds. As a young woman, I go for deep purples, fuscia, and lots of green. 

Really there’s no colour I don’t like. I like combinations of clashing colours like blue and orange, red and green, or purple and yellow (although this one has been spoiled for me somewhat as it’s the colours of a very racist and homophobic party that governs my home town). 

I’m very sensitive to light and it’s often unpleasant to walk down the street on a sunny day. But on a day when I’m in an open space full of different coloured flowers, or I can see the ocean and the sky, or a valley full of trees in autumn, or fields, it’s not so much like a sensory overload and more like a sensory orgasm (sorry to those who are sex repulsed but I don’t know how else to explain it!).  It fills me with such strong feelings like I want to cry, or laugh, or jump in the air and whoop. I feel like a dog or a rabbit when they get a burst of energy and run through the grass like a rocket. There have been times where I’ve been able to express these feelings, but not often. It’s not really “acceptable” for a grown adult to do these things, so I often photograph things I love or draw them later. Unfortunately, cameras don’t pick up on the intricacy of thne colours or their vividness, and I don’t really draw the thing, I end up drawing a massively exaggerated version of the thing because a line-for-line representation does sod all justice to the way it makes me feel.

My mum grows lots of different coloured flowers in her garden. That home has lots of negative associations, mainly because of her, but one thing she didn’t manage to spoil was the sight of marigolds and montbretia glowing as brightly as the sun itself. And my ginger cat who looked like he was made of pure gold when the sun caught his fur. My favourite photograph of him is him lying down under the montbretia bush like a little fluffy sunbeam.

When I see rainbows I don’t even want to blink because they don’t happen often. I sometimes wonder if they will ever appear again, or whether it’s the last one I’ll ever see. I get the same excitement as I did when I first saw one when I was three years old. It’s like a little cosmic gift. 

When I was on holiday in Cyprus with my boyfriend and his grandparents they found it slightly annoying how I was photographing nearly every Bougainvillea tree I encountered, but they all looked so stunningly beautiful in their own different ways and I didn’t want to forget any of them. They were every shade of pink and orange in front of a sky that was deeper than any blue I’d seen in England. I didn’t want to leave. 

It was quite a big day for me yesterday (relative's wedding reception) and even though there was a lot of dancing I didn't fall over, knock anyone over, break anything, or anyone... the Gremlins must have been too drunk at the bar to mess up my evening, and for that I'm very grateful! Something my nan said to me last night really touched me. 

But first, we need to backtrack 10-20 years, when I was a kid, both my mum and my nana were constantly telling me off, to sit down, be quiet, stop tapping, be more organised, for-god's-sake-stop-talking-when-people-don't-understand-you-it's-embarrassing... the list goes on. The prefix to any sort of telling off is what I dreaded... “Why Can’t You Just”. They couldn’t understand why I had trouble doing these things. They thought that because I was “so clever at school” that I was choosing to misbehave. The impression I got is that they thought I was selfish, and for a long time I believed them. I would agonise over it. 

Why can’t I just be normal, I would cry, my foot flapping all over the place because in my room no one was telling me to stop doing it, and the pressure had been building up all day from suppressing it.

Why can’t I be normal, I would cry, every time someone asked me to tell them about my hobbies and ended up with a screwed up face because I was talking too fast and backwards.

Why can’t I be normal, I would cry with a complete understanding of my work in my head, and only scribbled nonsense and a messy desk to show for it.

I haven’t lived with them for a few years now. I’m 23, I’ve had time to rebuild confidence, to accept and embrace how my dyspraxia shapes my personality, to defiantly ignore the echoes of their voices in my head, to do and say what my instincts tell me. 

I was nervous, before the wedding reception, but I finally felt ready to show my family my personality for what it actually is, not the trimmed, tidy, demure little thing they’d tried to preserve from my toddlerhood. And you know what? I f*cking did it and I enjoyed every second. I found common ground with cousins I hadn’t seen in years, I danced like the Tasmanian devil in a hurricane, and was brutally honest about no longer giving a monkeys about being the scholar of the family. They supported me; they were just thankful that I was happy at last. 

In the car on the way home my mum had her old Soul and Motown tapes on. I’d had far too much to drink and I was laying across the back seats singing, doing impressions of musical instruments, telling mum and nana what a great night I’d had...

Then my nan turned around in her seat and said in her stop-that-nonsense voice “Anyone ever tell you, you’re a nutcase?”

And I looked her straight in the eye, fully expecting a slap, and said “You two did nana but like you always said I never listen.”

To which she burst out laughing and said... 

POSITIVE THING #3: COMPASSION AND EMPATHY

As a child, it was acknowledged that I could be sweet and kind. Unfortunately, this was overshadowed by other sentences like You Never Listen, You Don’t Care About Anyone Around You, You’re Inconsiderate, If Only They Knew What You Were Like At Home... and the dreaded You Have No Empathy.

People with an Autism Spectrum Disorder will no doubt be rolling their eyes at this one. I still don’t know whether or not I’m autistic but that’s not the point! If you have a learning difficulty like dyspraxia or autism, social awareness may not come naturally to you. But that doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not you’re a good person.

When I was about three years old and my friend was two, she scratched my face and drew blood. I started crying. She was told off and also started crying. At this point, according to two eyewitnesses, I stopped crying, gave her a hug, and said “It’s all right, it didn’t hurt.” Even at this young age, I recognised that she hadn’t meant to hurt me and that she was still my friend.

As I got older, my mother taught me to distrust people in difficulty because I spent a lot of my time and energy counselling people on instant messenger or facebook, or in my lunch hour at school. “They’re probably attention seeking”, she said. It was true that a lot of my “friends” took me for a ride, used up my kindness and threw me away when they realised I was a bit too weird to be seen in public with. But since I left her house, and started listening to my dad (see previous post) I realised that my deepest instinct is to help people who are suffering, even if others think it would be inappropriate to do so.

A classic example is when I worked in outdoor catering. On a few occasions, I saw people wet through from the rain, looking faint, sad, pale, and shaky. I did not wait to find out how my boss felt about what I was doing. I just got someone to cover front of house while I took the affected person round the back of the tent, gave them a free meal and a cup of tea, and talked to them about what was wrong. The result of this was that I helped a young autistic woman suffering a panic attack to calm down and feel better, and find her father in a field of 3,000 people by getting security to radio round and look for him. I also managed to convince a member of staff that it didn’t matter if she was leaving her colleagues short of workers, she was too ill to work, and I managed to convince her boss the same thing. I expected to be told off, but I wasn’t. I trusted my instincts, despite what I had been taught, and in the end I had done the right thing. 

A few months ago, I met a young woman who was about to become homeless. I knew she had been brought up among violence, gang culture, thieving, drug dealing, and all manner of illegal stuff. My mother would have said not to trust her or get involved with such a person. She would have said my friend was lying about the extreme situations she has been involved in and the abuse she described to me. I ignored all of those “learned” instincts, and stripped my perception back to basics: SHE NEEDED HELP. 

And within days she was living with me, sharing my food and blankets and utilities. Not only did she have what she needed, I learned so much about the world, and had such a laugh while being her friend. I found that I needed her as much as she needed me. She has a flat of her own now and my partner and I have our camper van, but she’s still one of my best friends. She even said to me that I’ve shown her a better way in life and she feels like she’s become a better person. Part of me is cringeing while writing this because I don’t really want to blow my own trumpet but in this instance it is necessary to help you guys recognise that your social difficulties DO NOT MAKE YOU BAD PEOPLE. (And to help me remember that too).

Maybe it is because I have a real problem with eye contact. Maybe it’s because I have little spacial awareness so I get in people’s way a lot. Maybe it’s because I put sauces and spices back in the cupboard and forget to ask anyone else if they want them. Maybe it’s because British people have such a preoccupation with manners, sarcasm, euphemistic language, and an all-out dislike of not saying what they mean that it’s literally impossible for me to pick apart what is actually being said. And all of this is perceived as a lack of compassion and empathy. I CALL BULL ON THIS ONE!!! I would rather make people slightly uncomfortable in my day to day life and spend my energy doing the right thing, than spend all my energy making myself acceptable to others while neglecting actual human suffering that I have the capacity to resolve. 

POSITIVE THING NUMBER 2: MY MUSIC. AND MY DAD.

I didn’t know my dad until I was 14, but I wish I had. I still have only met him three times because illness and finances prevent us from crossing the Irish Sea! 

Even before I had met him, I knew that one of his favourite songs was You’ve Got A Friend by James Taylor. Last summer we performed it together. Our stage was the sidewalk of Hastings Old Town and our audience were a bunch of apathetic shoppers, but to me it felt like the Troubadour. 

My father is an incredible musician, and a wonderful man.  He was born in 1956 in Jaffa, Israel, to incredibly strict parents. He did not know that he had learning difficulties because they hardly existed back then. He was called stupid, lazy, and naive. They were wrong. 

My father could not read and write until he was well into his twenties. But he taught himself how to play the guitar to an exceptional level. He has won multiple awards and is a well-loved member of the jazz and blues community in Ireland. He constantly studies music, writes music, and plays music. Without formal musical education as a child, he has developed a distinctive and individual style that people love, and that helped him grow into himself. 

Not only this, my father’s divergent thinking helps him to be a wonderfully compassionate person who constantly raises awareness of humanitarian issues and social justice, despite the fact he was brought up amongst a violent, xenophobic, and misogynist regime. In fact when he was a young man he became so disillusioned with it he lived with Palestinian Muslims (who the Israeli Zionists [backed by Britain] were in the process of slaughtering in order to claim their land and make profits for what was left of the British Empire) and refused to return to his family home. For the majority of his adult life he has worked tirelessly to unlearn toxic attitudes and spread love and hope. The abuse he suffered as a child and a young man was horrific, and I won’t go into it here. But to go through that, and still be the person he is today, shows that he is a man of phenomenal courage.

Since meeting him, I have realised I am more like him than the rest of my family. He helped me find the courage within myself to shake off abuse and toxic attitudes of my own, and just be me.

When I was young my mum noticed my natural aptitude for music, but my love for it was destroyed by her perfectionism. “If you can’t do it perfectly you haven’t practiced enough”. “Don’t do it like that because you need to learn all the rules before you can break them”. “You’re not feeling the music”. Unsurprisingly, my mother is not a musician and she also does not live in my head. I trusted her judgement for years before I realised that she was talking out of her arse.

When I met up with my dad I told him I didn’t do music much any more “because of uni work” “because I don’t have time” etc etc etc. He put on his angry dad face and said “You’ve been discouraged!” I disagreed at first because I didn’t want to trivialise the efforts that my mum and teachers went through to make me good at music. I felt like I didn’t have the discipline. My dad taught me that the problem was not with discipline; it was with boredom.

Some people learn music by practicing scales, arpeggios, and individual pieces to absolute perfection. In any musical education there is an element of this, but I don’t learn like that and neither does my dad.

He sat me down and said to me “Just play something you love.” He played a simple chord one note at a time, slowly, his eyes shut. I could tell that world around him disappeared, and was replaced by four, clear, beautiful, repeated notes. D. A. D. F#. D. A. D. I knew this because this is what I did when I was “messing around” or “playing nothing”. What my dad taught me is that this is as far from “nothing” as you could possibly get. What he was teaching me is that if you start learning with a simple sound you know and love, you will grow into your style organically.