Category: dyspraxia

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Plan to Plan

Ten years ago, when I was going to business networking meetings, I was part of a team of three people organising meetings in a local pub on alternate Wednesday mornings. I was in charge of sending out email and text invitations, chasing up invitees to confirm numbers, collecting payments and paying the pub for breakfasts consumed, working with a woman in her forties who was an area rep, in charge of a number of fortnightly groups locally. The third member was a an older man (older than  I was then but probably younger than I am now), whom I’ll call Charles (I can’t remember whether that was actually his name) who chaired the meetings and was a general figurehead for the group.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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Finding the Way (or not)

Now my proof-reading job has finished, I was planning to get on with ‘The Long Way Back’. But I’ve reached the time when I was in Prague, and even starting to read back the blog posts from that time has reminded me of how stressed I was over the teaching course, interviews, flat, etc, not to mention the accident when I fell on my face and the problems with my teeth. There’s a story there to be told, but it’s not a very cheerful one, nor is the year that followed it, and I’m back with a sense of not wanting to touch it, as I had the last time I tried, three years ago. But if I leave it like that, I guess in a way it will always haunt me, and I have to draw a line under it somehow.

Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

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Walking Into the Wind

Walking the other way, the way I used to go every Monday morning, towards the leisure centre and the now defunct swimming pool.

The wind is coming from the sea and right up my street, the way it wasn’t on Friday. More wind means more waves and that’s more usual than Friday’s calm. Even in the Rock Gardens, which always used to be a haven, I can still feel it, or at least hear it. A flock of pigeons skitters in the sky, crossing each other’s paths then dispersing in a shower of squawks. A ribbon of toilet paper flutters across the path, but later it seems miraculously to have been blown into a ball, wedged against a rock marking the edge of a flower bed.

Before I left home, the weather app promised me no rain for at least 60 minutes, so why can I feel splashes on my face, too far from the beach to be spray?

I glance at my watch: 8.25, half an hour till the cafes open, so I head for the shelter on the prom. Is it raining? I still can’t tell, the clouds are grey enough, and the gulls are flying high, circling against their dark backdrop. The flagpole outside the Lifeguard Station keeps up its tattoo of rope against metal as the waves continue to roar majestically, and the sun reappears, silvering the surface. I watch someone from the cafe pushing a sack-barrow, moving a plant pot to the edge of the seating area – it must have been moved to safety overnight to stop it being blown over.

When I step outside the shelter, the wind comes back again, full force. I walk back to the Rock Gardens, to the bench where I was before, still no rain, and I notice how close it is to the fish pond, which I had my back to before, so didn’t consider as a source for the droplets.

I think I’ll wait for the cafe to open at nine, then realise that I’d still have to sit outside on the prom to eat my breakfast, so give up and walk home.

I read this on the Dyspraxia Facebook group:

I’m done with shame and feeling sorry for myself. I will no longer apologise and be a victim to it. You don’t see a wheelchair user apologise for using a chair. So why should we apologise for how our wires connect in our brain ? Which is outside of our control. We either work with it or struggle against it. Either way we owe no one an apology for how we’re wired.

At first reading I felt irritated by it, because after all, shame, apologising and self-pity have been a way of life for me. Looking at it again, I can see it’s not a personal attack on me, in fact it’s a perfectly sensible attitude, but somehow it struck a nerve, maybe because I’ve always judged myself on those criteria and come up wanting.

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Sunday Morning

What have I done already today?

Tried to take a photo of the sunrise from my bedroom window. Opened the window to get a better view, and a credit card and train ticket fell out of my phone wallet onto the flat roof of the extension below. Fortunately, a few days ago I found in my bedroom a litter grabber which I bought when I was living in the flat and had a similar accident with something on the roof of the bay window. I couldn’t manage to pick the card up, but I did succeed in knocking it off onto the patio/gravel. Went downstairs in my dressing gown and opened the door, saw credit card immediately over by the garden table. Walked over gravel in bare feet and picked it up. Went back inside and picked gravel off my feet.

Checked the credit cards in my phone and realised my Barclaycard (the one I most often use) was missing. The last time I used it was in the knitting shop yesterday, where I went to buy some yarn for my weather blanket. I emptied my coat pockets and handbag but couldn’t find it, looked around all the obvious places, still no sign. Went back out into the garden, couldn’t see it anywhere on the gravel, peeped through a gap in the fence at next door’s patio but it wasn’t obviously there. It started to rain. I rummaged around in some plants/weeds (false valerian, which is pretty in small doses but grows like a weed) between the edge of my steps and the fence, and found my Barclaycard.

Went back inside, picked gravel off my feet again, went back to bed, and back to sleep, although it was nearly six o’clock by this time. Had a dream, which was very interesting when I woke up, but I’ve now forgotten. Woke up shortly before eight and got up. Fed cat, let her out. Did yoga/tai chi. Picked up clothes from bedroom floor, found a complete set of clean bed linen (including matching pillow cases) and had first attempt at changing the duvet cover.

Took washing basket downstairs and loaded the contents into the washing machine. Tried to pull out the dispenser drawer – which is filthy and I’ve been thinking for a while it needs cleaning – but it got stuck half way and then I couldn’t get it back in and couldn’t get it all the way out. I used to have a Persil ball but lost it somewhere, and bought a large bottle with another one, but lost that too, so I took a top from a fabric conditioner bottle, filled that and balanced it on the washing then switched on the machine. Had shower and washed hair. Made coffee.

Now here I am, still in my dressing gown (but clean), writing my blog and drinking coffee. I can’t remember what I was thinking about while I was doing my exercises, two hours ago, but I don’t suppose it was important.

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Space

Yesterday I went for a walk in the morning, and wrote in my notebook, then came home and typed up what I’d written, and started to carry on describing the walk, but stopped because I had some proof reading to do, so did that, and now that project is over and done with, and that’s a relief, but in the rest of the day I never got back to writing.

I guess I could be finishing it now, but I woke up thinking about the struggle between my dyspraxia and daily functioning in the real world, how it’s always there and how it consumes so much energy. I had several attempts at writing the first half of that sentence without explicitly mentioning ‘dyspraxia’ – my first inclination was to talk about my ‘true nature’, which sounded very airy-fairy, then my ‘natural tendencies’, but I settled on just calling it ‘dyspraxia’ because I’ve come to realise, by comparing notes with other people in the online group, how many aspects of my personality and behaviour which I used to find awkward and hard to explain or justify are common among the group, and how many other people in that group also find life a struggle because of them.

In my therapy session on Thursday, I read out the ‘Square Peg’ poem which I wrote last week. Her response was that it’s quite upbeat and ‘affirmative’ because of the ending, and I wondered why it didn’t feel that way to me. I thought about other similar poems I’ve written, like ‘The Awkward One’ and ‘Declaration’, where overall the message is so grim that I’ve tried to turn them around at the end by suggesting that I’m on top of it all. I tried to explain this, and she said: ‘So you’re saying that you try to make the ending more upbeat for the sake of the reader?’ which didn’t really sound right, but I didn’t know what else to say.

I guess that in each case there is a kind of aspiration in those endings, but a hidden doubt as to whether those aspirations are achievable. They’re also very angry poems, I notice, along with another one I remembered, ‘The Answers’, which I also looked up and realised that it didn’t have an optimistic turn at the end (and in case you’re wondering what ‘answers’ it refers to, it’s about dealing with chemotherapy, so it could be argued that there was a ‘happy ending’ but anyone who’s been through it can probably tell you that that is hard to hang on to at the time).

So, where do I stand with regard to the ending of ‘The Square Peg’?

My edges are what
make me who I am;
they fuel the restless longing
for a space where I could fit;
a space I’ll never find
unless I make it for myself.

Linda Rushby 1 May 2021

How much progress do I feel I’ve made with respect to ‘finding’ or ‘making’ that space?

What can I say? Watch this space.

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May Day, M’Aidez

Well, it’s May Day, how did that happen? How are we already a third of the way through the year?

And another anniversary, and not just of the second day of the move, but a year later, when I got an email from my ex-husband saying that he’d had an offer on the house, which set the wheels in motion towards my finally moving into this house – with all the Stuff from the attic and both cats – but not till another six months later.

On my walk yesterday, I wrote a poem in my notebook while sitting behind the café, but didn’t post it on here, because I had to do the final NPWM as well (I’m tired of that acronym and the alternating shift-key-no-shift-key palaver). I will type it now and see what the word count is, and decide whether I need it to fill out this post or I’ve got enough to say otherwise.

Just the one poem. I mentioned in my therapy session that I came up with four poems on my walk last Saturday. The therapist didn’t respond directly, but later referred back to me casually mentioning it, as though it was nothing much, whereas to her it seemed like it was some kind of achievement. But then, what was it? It was just me going to the trouble of writing down some stuff that came into my head – that’s all my poems ever are, after all. If I’d casually mentioned that I’d hoovered my whole house, or cleaned all the windows, inside and out, now that would be a remarkable achievement.

I can’t repeat this often enough: I don’t know where my writing comes from, I have no control over it (especially poems). It’s all about this torrent of words in my head. That’s how I manage to churn out these 500 words a day – how I even once managed to produce five thousand words in thirty days (and what a massive waste of time that was). I know sometimes I say that I don’t know what to write about, but that’s usually not because there is nothing there but because what is there is stuff I’m either embarrassed to show or something which might cause trouble in some way if I did share it. Sometimes it comes in a kind of rhythm, and then it might be the start of a poem, and it might go on to be a poem.

The Square Peg

You’ll never file my edges off
to make me fit the hole
you planned for me,
however hard you try.

I tried so many years
to mould myself
into the space I thought
I ought to fill.
I always failed, and
took the failure on myself,
and blamed myself for failing
every time.

My edges are what
make me who I am;
they fuel the restless longing
for a space where I could fit;
a space I’ll never find
unless I make it for myself.

Linda Rushby 1 May 2021

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Procrastination

An interesting question came up on the dyspraxia Facebook page, as someone commented that their procrastination had: ‘…gotten (sic) out of control’, especially in relation to washing up. The first person to comment said; ‘You’re punishing yourself, stop it’, and the second asked what they were doing instead; was it something else on their to-do list? (to which the answer was: watching telly). Mine of course would be: knitting, or crochet. Or maybe, as the temperature is now gradually creeping up, sitting in the garden in the sunshine (though not actually doing any gardening).

I say it’s interesting because instinct tells me that my tendency to procrastinate is somehow linked to dyspraxia, but the stern voices in my head say: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, it’s just because you’re a lazy cow and you’re trying to make excuses by blaming dyspraxia for everything’. The tendency to dither, take too long over things, and get easily distracted is certainly related to dyspraxia, as is the generation of so much chaos in your surroundings that you learn to ignore it and accept it as a fact of life – not to mention feelings of exhaustion and lack of energy to tackle any of it.

I also believe that lockdown has been responsible for encouraging this kind of procrastination. It creates a sense of unlimited time and reduces stress by eliminating the need to leave the house and engage with the world, while also removing the enforced motivator of anticipation that outsiders might come into the house and see what a shithole it is, which is usually a major driver for me to engage with housework.

That said, I’ve been making more of an effort against the washing-up-sitting-in-the-sink phenomenon. In my dim-and-distant days as a Young Mum, I was well known for my inability to sit down and relax with a drink until after the washing up had been dealt with. These days I can’t wait to get out of the kitchen-dining room and retreat to the sofa, my latest project and a couple of episodes of ‘Law and Order’ (my latest retro-catch-up series from twenty years ago, which has intriguing plots and engaging characters without the visceral gore that’s obligatory these days). In the last few months I’ve been struggling to revive that past diligence by at least making an effort to leave pots and pans standing for no longer than one day – last week I even found myself one morning spontaneously cleaning the top of my gas hob while I was waiting for the coffee machine.

The neighbouring house on the side that shares a wall with my kitchen is rented out on short-term lets, so the tenants change quite frequently, and I don’t have much contact with them. The last few mornings I have heard the sound of a plug being inserted in a socket the other side of the wall while I’m having breakfast, and then the drone of a hoover. Every. Single. Day.

Is it me, or is that ‘normal’?

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Gobbledygook

Thursday, 22 April 2021n the Windows logn screen eing part of the same, instead of both yrtnewswf what is ectrum  sf te ends si are somehow at oppentertainmentport’ and enas though .ekt do you remember from the news this wekhenthing in betwSport to entertainment and everr: ayinessage here was a  PC this morningon my…

When I glanced up from typing, the above gobbledygook was on my screen. How it got so mangled I have no idea – clearly in some places I had hit the ‘up arrow’ and taken my cursor – and hence my typing – up to the line above – something that frequently happens when I’m typing without paying attention, often leading to whole lines being overwritten and I have to copy what’s there onto the ‘clipboard’ and carefully go back through ‘undo’ to get back what’s disappeared. If I untangle the mess, I think what I was trying to say was this:

‘On the Windows login screen on my PC this morning there was a message saying: Sport to entertainment and everything in between, what do you remember from the news this week?’ as though ‘sport’ and ‘entertainment’ are somehow at opposite ends of a spectrum of ‘the news’ as opposed to being both at the same end…’ and I was intending to go on to write something about the implication that the genuinely important stuff about what’s happening in the world can somehow be dismissed as less significant  – but I’m not going to go into that now because I’m just amazed at the madness I seem to have unleashed, and would like to make the analogy that that is pretty much what it feels like inside my mind most of the time. (Forgot tpo mentione that somehow I also caused this paragraph to go to double spacing, but I’ve corrected that. ‘to mention’.)

Well.

I have written two poems (one for today, on efor tomorrow – maybe) on my notebook with my black crayon pencil while still in bed. This new technology of discovered is still working find, though no doubt the ‘lead’ will snap soon. ‘one for’ not ‘on efor’ and ‘I’ve’ not ‘of’. It’s interesting to note that writing words that sound vaguely like the one I intended to write seems to be quite a new phenomenon in my wrting/typing’. ‘fine’ not ‘find’. ‘writing’ not ‘wrting’. And so it goes. My typing is becoming, at first glance, almost as illegible as my handwriting. I now the right words perfectly well, they just come out wrong. ‘know’, not ‘now’ – and I promise you I am not doing this deliberately, just not making the corrections when I notice them. And Word spell checker just automatically corrected ‘diong’ to doing’ – but not that time. Interesting.

Well, that has taken up most of 500 words this morning, writing about my terrible typing. I once wrote about this before and read it out at a writers group and everyone laughed. It’s mortying when everyone supposedly laughing ‘with’ you fails to notice you’re not laughing. Mortifying.

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Ducks in a Row

I am not two different people, or three or four, or however many I might have said at different times. Just want to make that clear. I am not Linda H OR Linda R; or Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra, Cat by Herself; I am both, all of them, or possibly even none, but in the end I am still me. When I switched on my PC this morning, Microsoft welcomed me as Linda H, while my laptop knows me as Linda R, but it’s just a matter of context. To family, Facebook, Twitter, close friends and acquaintances I’ve met since I moved to Southsea, I am R, but to most of officialdom (Portsmouth City Council, HMRC, DWP, DVLA, banks etc) and most people I know from Bedford days, I am still H – there is even a very small number of people I’m still in touch with who knew me from when I was ‘R’ before, forty years ago now.

I didn’t set out to write about my identity today, in fact I was intending to pull together some threads which I was thinking and writing about last week – so here goes. I was talking about card-making, and all the different items and processes involved in it that make it so unsuitable for anyone with dyspraxia and hence so stressful. Every time, I start intending to be more organised and keep a lid on the chaos, but it never works out that way.

But I was thinking about it as a microcosm of my life. There are things that need doing, and I have to think and decide about what’s the best order to do them in, and how I’m going to do them, and what I need to do them with, and by the time I’ve made a decision on any of those things, I’ve forgotten what I decided about the previous ones, and so I go round and round in circles.

I have spent a lifetime thinking that there are answers to these questions and that I should be able to get on top of them, that if I try just a bit harder I can make everything fall into place, and my life will become so much easier. Now I’m coming to accept that all the planning and to-do lists in the world are never going to change me, or change the way things are. There’s a saying going the rounds on Facebook (is ‘meme’ the correct word for that sort of thing?) which I’ve seen a couple of times: ‘Not only are my ducks not all in a row, I don’t even know where my ducks are!’ I’m not even sure whether I’ve got any ducks in the first place.

I sit in my chaos thinking about how to resolve it, and never manage to break out of those circles. Except sometimes I get an idea about one specific thing – like my google drive – and keep looking for an answer, however many times I fall down

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Crafting Chaos

Yesterday I started off with one topic but didn’t finish it before I moved on to something else – okay, you could say that I never finish anything, and that’s true, but I didn’t really say what I wanted to say.

I thought I had a great start going, I’d been thinking it in my head a couple of previous days but then discovered I had other stuff to say when I got onto the keyboard. That’s how it works. I can’t remember what I said that was so good, because once it’s written it goes, and that’s how it works too. I could open yesterday’s file and read it back but I don’t usually do that.

This coffee is weak. I only drink decaff, but that’s not the issue, it’s the flavour. It’s disappointing. I must have misjudged the amount of grounds I put in the machine. It was getting down to the bottom of the tin.

This is my mind, and the way it works all the time. That’s what I wanted to write about, about how exhausting it is to bounce around inside my head like this all the time and not have anything to show for it. I do nothing, I achieve nothing, but I’m not resting, not relaxing.

I sat and stared at all the mess on my kitchen table, trying to work out how to sort it all out. Some things have to be done before other things can be done (that’s also true of the process of card making, which I also mentioned yesterday – now I’m beginning to remember). I have to sort out in my head which is the best order to do it in and what I need to do first. There are tools, like the scissors, tweezers and the pokey tool (apparently that’s its official title), they all go in one of the small drawers, which are somewhere in the mix, but should I do those first? There are piles of paper, card, sticky-back paper, stamps, cutting dies; packets for the stamps to be put away in; packets for the dies, which come in sets; packets containing dies or stamps which I got out but didn’t use; ink pads; plastic wallets containing scraps of paper; scraps of paper left over from cutting, some of which can go into those plastic wallets but some which should probably just go in the bin; bits of backing from used sticky-back paper; plates from the rolling machine; envelopes; finished cards; the machine itself; two guillotines; the cutting mat; the craft knives…every time I think I’ve finished the list, I remember something else.

It makes sense to put the small things together in piles eg one of dies, one of stamps… but there isn’t any space left on the table, so things spread further around the kitchen. The stamps and dies from a specific set can be collected together and put into their packet, if I can find the packet, which is somewhere on the table…