Category: dyspraxia

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In Absentia

I said yesterday that I’d started a to-do list. I actually did one of the five things I’d written on it – clear and clean the kitchen table. I also did other things related to that which I hadn’t written on the list – like putting away (or rather, dumping in the study) the toys the grandkids had out last week (not just the ones on the kitchen table, but also the ones in the front room); cleaning the sink, draining board and surrounding counters; pulling bags of yarn out of the Chinese cabinet looking for something to use for the border of the baby blanket I’m making for my daughter’s ex-sister-in-law’s second baby (and hence Flick’s cousin) who was born last week (because I need to use all the yarn I have for the blanket itself or else it will be unbalanced because I only had four balls of the original and have had to do a band of a different colour in the middle, and don’t want to go back and start again given that the baby’s already arrived).

I started wondering how much of my time in an average day is taken up with looking for things, often things I’ve only mislaid in the previous five minutes. My first instinct was that it’s probably between about one and two hours. That might sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m sure it’s never less than half an hour, and that is balanced out by days when I might spend several hours on trying to find one particular thing. More than once I’ve had kind people (who presumably think I’m incapable of thinking this out for myself) suggest that I have specific places for things like my glasses, phone, keys, wallet, hand bag, coat etc etc etc so I always know where to look for them. I then watch their expressions go from helpful to sceptical as I point out that the problem doesn’t arise at the point when I’m looking for whatever it is – when my mind and concentration is focussed on finding and I do indeed go straight to those ‘specific places’, before starting to figure out exactly where it is this time – but at the point when I put it down, when my mind is NOT concentrating on what I’m doing, but probably on what I’m going to do next; or what needs doing and what I should be doing next; or what I’m going to cook for dinner and when I need to start that; or what somebody said to me earlier or last year; or what I should have said or done in response but didn’t; or what I’ll say next time; or just generally (in that lovely phrase) ‘away with the fairies’.

To use another lovely phrase, I am ‘absent-minded’, and most of the time my mind is completely absent from whatever and wherever I need it to be in that moment, and this, I suppose, is the root of all my difficulties.

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Monday Morning

Back here again. Why? Because half the time I swear I’ve given up for good and then one morning I think I might try again. Just this once. On the understanding that it’s the same old nonsense and, basically, a complete waste of my time writing and yours (whoever you are) for reading it.

But we both still have a chance. You can stop right here – or I could, in which case you wouldn’t have the chance either way, because obviously I wouldn’t bother to post this. But I probably won’t – stop, that is. Though with another potential 400 words… Who knows?

It’s nine o’clock now (I went to the Co-op before starting) and it’s Monday. Does that mean I can play music without worrying about disturbing the neighbours? There again, they might work shifts, for all I know.

Okay, now I’m playing Roxy Music’s ‘Flesh and Blood’, that being the first cassette I pulled out of the shoebox at random that I haven’t already transferred to the PC. Still haven’t done anything about replacing the stylus on my turntable.

Reached the second track, ‘Oh Yeah’, and the sound quality is pretty awful. I have the original album somewhere, so if I get my finger out and do something about that stylus, I can play that. But I still feel a bit wary about playing these old albums – they’ve been kept for all these years and moved from place to place, and maybe it’s all been a waste of time because they’re ruined anyway.

Next track, ‘Same Old Scene’, isn’t much better.

How do I manage to do anything? Repetition, routine, and constant self-bullying. I bullied myself into going to the Co-op this morning. I bullied myself into putting the shopping away when I got back, and starting a ‘to-do’ list. The weight of the things I don’t do is always in my head, because I’m always thinking about them, except the times when I let myself off and sit in the sun or listen to the radio and/or crochet. Or else I’m thinking about other things, worse things, that I’ve read or heard or people have said or done to me that make me angry or sad or hopeless.

I think constantly about these things, but never do anything – worse, the thinking itself is completely aimless and futile, it’s not even as if by thinking I ever produce a coherent plan of action which I then proceed to complete. Except – well, I did start making that to-do list. If I completed some of those things, I suppose I’d be happier. But a more reliable way of becoming happier is by quietening the thinking – and the way to do that is by doing things that make me happy directly – like sitting in the sun, listening to the radio, and/or crocheting – all of which I may do later after I’ve had breakfast.

The second side of the album sounds better than the first one did.

Think it’s time for breakfast.

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Imminent Cahos (accidental typo, but I left it because it seesm appropriate – and there I go again!)

I mentioned that I’ve joined a Facebook group for dyspraxic adults. Yesterday I got involved in a hilarious thread about having to brush your teeth before you get dressed so you don’t get toothpaste down your top. There were 34 likes, loves and laughs (so far) to the original post, and pages of comments. Honestly (I have to keep saying this) I always assumed it was just me. A couple of people said: doesn’t everyone do this? But I know for sure, because the person I’ve lived with longest (my ex) somehow managed to brush his teeth with his mouth closed – I tried it a couple of times, but couldn’t master it. I used to assume it was because I habitually breathe through my mouth, due to all the rhinitis allergies I’ve had down the years (I was always that child with the permanently runny nose).

Someone asked: ‘Does your dyspraxia affect your daily life?’ to which the answer can only be: ‘Yes, massively!’ The most obvious effect is that my main source of exercise is wandering from room to room and up and down stairs because, as my Dad would say: ’you don’t let your head save your legs!’ (as if it was that easy – presumably it was, for him). I know many people see the constant back-and-forth of trying to find things and remember what you’re supposed to be doing and why you’re there as a huge joke, but it can be exhausting and beyond frustrating – after sixty-odd years, the humour has worn mighty thin. More than one person has dropped hints about early onset dementia to which I can only say: extremely early, considering I’ve been like it forever, but at least if it does come I’ll be well-prepared.

The short term memory thing, though very significant is only part of it, of course. Time- and spatial-organisation and management is another, and planning and sequencing activities down to minute detail is related to that. I’ve often felt (before I ever heard of dyspraxia) that I have problems managing boundaries – temporal, spatial, interpersonal, probably loads of other categories my left brain hasn’t yet thought of. It’s most obvious with time, I think – when I start doing something, it takes as long as it takes – it’s why I can’t handle deadlines, or keep appointments – both of which are sources of friction with the external world and other people – and hence sources of shame and self-recrimination, leading to stress and further inability to cope.

But by comparison with many of the younger people in the group I’m so fortunate – I possess the two great blessings of financial security and self sufficiency. Many of the posts are concerned with finding and keeping work, getting help, negotiating relationships and living with other people. One young woman said in a post yesterday: ‘How can I explain … that we don’t KNOW how we adapt our lives because it’s just normal to us?’

We never lose that sense of imminent chaos. But we adapt.

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More Musings

Another morning, another empty white screen.

Still reading that book. It’s moved on from left brain thinking to ways of developing the right brain: yoga, tai chi, meditation etc. The irony is that my PhD thesis was all about managing a world where causes are reductive and impacts are holistic. Trying to find left brain categories for right brain phenomena when language itself is suspect because it immediately binds thought into its own limitations. I used to get so excited about all that stuff, until I realised that this is in itself the problem, that the two can never be reconciled, and that’s why the world is in such a mess, and probably why my head is in such a mess too. I didn’t use the language of left-and-right-brains twenty five years ago, but the ideas are directly comparable.

How can I express myself more clearly? Reading back that last paragraph, I thought: it’s about control. We try to understand causes and control them, but the problems with this are legion: how do we identify the fundamental causes? How do we find ways of controlling them? How do we implement the controls and sanctions? How long does it take before we come up against the unintended consequences of those controls and sanctions? And what has happened in the meantime to the overall impacts we were trying to control in the first place? I could go on, but I’ve probably confused you more than enough already (if there is a ‘you’ still reading this).

And how, if at all, does this relate to my dyspraxia? The author of that book would probably say that my right brain is currently working out something that my left brain is preventing me from recognising.

Yesterday was Skype-therapy day, I read out to the therapist the list of ‘wisdom’ bullet points that I posted earlier in the week, and I thought I was being quite tongue-in-cheek about it, but part way down the list I started to get tearful. Because all those contradictions and over-simplifications are what makes up who I am, and can’t be wished away by well-intended platitudes, or by trying to make me laugh at myself when all I want to do is cry. Maybe, in the context of what I was saying, they’re a set of left-brain ‘solutions’ to the holistic right-brain question of who I am and how I get by in this world without shattering into a million fragments.

I’m not saying dyspraxia explains all of that. Of course, it’s a left-brain category and hence by its nature draws arbitrary lines in the sand – this side and that side, inside and outside. But the more I look into it, the more I unravel the strands of how I became this self-contradictory person, the more I can see how well it fits.

Yesterday I joined a Facebook group for dyspraxic adults. I have a sense of ‘coming out’ and being – not exactly proud (I don’t do ‘pride’) but maybe ‘honest’.   

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Every Day is New Again

Today is different. Every day is. Feeling quite good, which is noteworthy because so unusual. Wish I could tell you why, what makes today different from the norm, but I have no idea. I didn’t get any more sleep than usual – fell asleep around 12.20 (according to the app) and awake 4.30, so if anything slightly less. Don’t have to go anywhere today (except possibly yoga this evening if the ground isn’t too wet), so nothing to feel apprehensive about. I had a go at making a birthday card for my granddaughter yesterday, which has been lurking at the back of my mind for a while as something that needed doing – that probably helps.

Remembering the REM song, ‘Every Day is Yours to Win’:

‘Every day is new again
every day is yours to win,
that’s how heroes are made…’

I don’t anticipate being a hero today, or any time soon, but inclined to look for the good bits this morning – maybe I can have breakfast in the garden?

Still no idea what I’m going to write about. Yesterday I wrote about dyspraxia, which I’ve tentatively started on a couple of times before. Yesterday I went into more detail. It’s hard to explain because I’m still trying to get my head around it myself – and quite honestly, it doesn’t seem very well understood scientifically as yet, compared to dyslexia and dyscalculia, which have been studied for much longer. And (naturally), I’m not very good at explaining it to other people. When I try to talk about it, mostly they seem to think it’s snowflakey, self-justificatory nonsense and just an excuse for continuing to be lazy, scatty, disorganised and inconsiderate of others – or alternatively, that I’m being unnecessarily ‘hard’ on myself, and I’m really not any of those things, and I should stop ‘worrying’ about it. This is where writing comes in, because it’s so much easier to explain things when I have time to think and compose what I want to say without being face to face with somebody interrupting and asking questions and throwing me off-track (which usually results in me feeling tongue-tied, stupid and frustrated).

Now I’m staring at the screen wondering if I want to go on, and if so how, and looking again at that Paul Nash postcard, the one of the bird looking into a mirror on a cliff top. What you can’t see from my photo (because of the poor light in here) is that in the mirror there is the reflection of another bird, this one flying away in the distance.

I like art which shows the impossible, or what appears to be impossible, or at least unexpected. I’m not a fan of Dali (possibly coloured by what I know of his politics), but I quite like surrealism in general. I like pictures that get you thinking and seeing things in other ways. The literary equivalent is magical realism – I like that too, set in the ‘real world’ but with impossible bits.

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Coping (Barely)

Yesterday evening I felt overwhelmed by the futility of everything, and started weeping uncontrollably – which is unusual, because that’s how I normally feel in the morning. By the evening, it’s usually much better.

On Thursday, the therapist asked whether the dyspraxia assessment I had two years ago had come up with any advice or strategies which might make life easier. I couldn’t remember. I said I would look at the report, but when I started looking for it I couldn’t find it – because although I’d saved it in a folder in my documents, I’d done it under the name of the consultancy that did it, and I couldn’t remember what that was.

I went into my accounts for 2018, and found the name of the consultancy with the payment. I then searched on that, but Microsoft Search showed me links on the web, not in my files. So I tried again by searching for it in my emails (miraculously, although it could have been under any of four email addresses I use, it was in the first one I tried). I found the pdf attachment of the report, but it was password protected, I had to read another email to get the password, then I kept getting it wrong, but finally got into it. (It was after all this that I found that there was actually a folder under the consultancy name in my documents folder, plus a word document with the password in, but now I know it’s all there I will change the folder title to include ‘dyspraxia’ to make it easier to find next time).

The answer to the therapist’s question about advice was: ‘If Linda requires support whilst working as a self-employed writer and publisher she could consider workplace skills training with a specialist dyspraxia/dyslexia tutor’ but nothing about coping with daily life. Also, if I ever take any more exams, I should be entitled to extra time for completing them.

Under ‘Implications for work and study’, the consultant says: ‘Because of Linda’s difficulty processing information, she is likely to have problems: assimilating information when reading (thereby needing additional time to do so); formulating her thoughts, fluently and quickly…; with handwritten tasks (eg copying information); with memory (eg remembering instructions, sequencing, retrieving information and planning ahead); multi-tasking (eg dealing with multiple pieces of information/documentation)… with personal organisation; with co-ordination; and working within time constraints… she will require more time to learn and undertake complex tasks.’ (But no mention of cat food in the coffee pot, or where I put my glasses thirty seconds ago.)

Well, tell me something I don’t know already – but at least it’s reassuring to know there’s a reason why I’m so chaotic, even if there’s nothing I can do about it. Except, of course, to be a ‘good person’ – to become self-disciplined despite all my instincts and inclinations, organise my life and myself and keep on top of everything all the time – but somehow without being self-critical and beating myself up.

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No End

Two compliments about my writing yesterday – one from an old friend on Facebook, one (actually, several) from a new one over socially-distanced coffee on the beach. As usual, I was overwhelmingly stressed and apprehensive about meeting the second, but found myself pouring out my life story and then apologising – even when I waved my arms around and knocked over my coffee, she cleaned it up before I could even think what to do next, and offered to buy me another one (I refused, naturally – it was my fault that it happened.)

I sometimes wonder why people are ever this nice to me. They learn, of course, when they get to know me better.

We first met on a writing course immediately prior to lockdown – I might have mentioned that before? I’ve got a feeling I have. I’d said something about my thirty-year-work-in-progress fantasy novel, and she said: ‘I’ll look it if you like, bring it next week and I’ll let you have feedback the week after’. I felt really embarrassed, but I printed out the beginning, past the ‘inciting incident’ (hero’s journey creative writing course BS jargon) and handed it to her at the next session. I’m not really sure why I, but I suppose I just thought: ‘oh screw it’.

At the next session – which was the last of the course – she was very complimentary and full of questions. All I could say was – well, I haven’t done anything on it for fifteen years because I don’t know how to end it, or even to get closer to the end. We all went to lunch together as a group, and I’d taken my books with me to show the tutor (it was a general invitation to anyone who’d got a book to show). She picked up ‘S2S’, started looking at it, then said: ‘Can I borrow this?’ so of course I said yes. We exchanged emails and made a semi-arrangement to meet up for coffee in a couple of weeks, but of course that didn’t happen. Since then we have exchanged irregular emails and last week finally fixed up this meeting.

I was relieved to find out that she hasn’t been doing any writing either, apart from a journal. We grinned wryly at one another about good intentions and motivation.

She writes short stories –and has sent one in to a competition since we last met. I said that I don’t do short stories because I can’t think of endings. I guess I’m basically a poet, since that’s all the muses – or the Universe, or whatever’s responsible for this stuff – ever seems to send me. And I realised – though I might have had this thought before and forgotten it – that the advantage of poems is that they don’t really need tied up endings or conclusions – they are just there, and open to whatever. Well, the ones I write are.

But the weird thing is that I’ve completed stories in the past. I guess it’s all about luck.

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Little Failures

Years ago, I was thinking of the things I wanted to exclude from my life – as if I could wish them away – and came to the conclusion that they boiled down to: loneliness and fear. Since then, I have come to appreciate solitude, and recognise that for me, fear (like hell) is mostly about other people. These last three months of lockdown have thrown that into a clear perspective for me. Now I have to start thinking about how I negotiate going out and interacting in the future – returning to the ‘real’ world. I’m in no hurry, though I have been to one socially-distanced outdoor yoga class (I found an excuse not to return last week), and I’ve been semi-invited to coffee at an outdoor café with members of a group I used to meet regularly. Maybe I’ll go – if the weather’s okay. I don’t know yet, it’s a couple of days away.

Looks sunny this morning, but I won’t be rushing to the beach – even in a normal summer, I avoid it at weekends. Be nice if I can sit in the garden though.

I wrote yesterday about the big things that have been missing from my life: professional career, satisfactory relationship; financial independence and writing…That last one is weird, I don’t know how to explain it, because clearly at the moment I am ‘writing’ every day, and if I say ‘writing success’, it will sound as though I mean mega sales, but that’s not what it’s about. Nor is it just ‘completing a book’, because I’ve done that, and got as far as self-publishing – which impresses some friends who don’t realise how easy it is. More sales would help, of course, but probably wouldn’t encourage pride in what I’ve written.

Well, as often happens, my writing is taking a different turn from what I’d planned this morning. I was going to set aside the big failures – the ones I have to live with and let go – and talk about the little ones that constantly trip me up – the daily ones that grind me down, and are probably responsible for my inability to achieve any of the big ones. But now I’ve started to write my mind has gone into a fog of wordlessness about all that shit. Although I’m slowly coming to recognise them more and more clearly, I still can’t see a way of explaining them without being misunderstood. And that’s part of the problem – my inability to explain myself in ways that make sense to anyone else. That’s one of the ‘little failures’ that I’m talking about. What else? Inability to make decisions; fear of expressing opinions that other people might disagree with; forgetfulness (the big one); inability to absorb instructions and implement them; conversely, inability to give instructions to others; untidiness and inability to self-organise; lousy time management; procrastination; lack of motivation, lack of empathy; all that stuff. In other words: dyspraxia.  

Inability to see any value, or take any pride, in anything I do.

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Rising and Retiring

While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.

Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.

Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?

I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing. 

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Hang it all.

I wait in the darkness
hoping for an answer.

Linda Rushby 22 June 2020

…popped into my head. Actually, it went through a couple of edits before I wrote it out. The first version of the second line was ‘trying to find an answer’, but that felt a bit unbalanced, so it became ‘Searching for an answer’ then I asked myself: am I really ‘searching’? So it became ‘hoping’, or it could have been ‘waiting’, both much more passive.

Don’t even know why I thought that in the first place, because the last thing I can remember thinking about was hanging pictures, which has been in my mind a lot recently because a large part of the mess in the study is piles of the things, which haven’t been put up in the three and a half years I’ve lived here and they’re all around me when I’m writing (incidentally, that reminds me of something I thought earlier about using the passive voice as a way of absolving yourself of responsibility, like saying to the cat: ‘your water hasn’t been changed, has it?’ instead of ‘I haven’t changed your water’, which was an actual conversation I had when I was feeding her this morning).

And may I say that anyone who is now thinking: ‘Poor old bat, this lockdown thing really has sent her loopy’ doesn’t know me at all well, because that is exactly the kind of thing I have always done, lockdown or not.

So, as I was saying, although I’ve lived here three and a half years I still haven’t put pictures on the walls, except in the kitchen, where there were already quite a few picture hooks when I moved in. That’s the clue – the lack of picture hooks, and my inability to put them up – inability, not laziness, because for some reason I have lost that skill with the hammer which I must have had at one time, because I put up loads of picture hooks in my flat in Bedford, but now all that happens when I try is that I beat the hooks flat or knock bits of plaster off, or, of course, painfully smash my digits. I put this down mostly to the walls being too hard, but dyspraxia and failing eyesight probably come into it too.

When I was in my last (rented) flat, I bought some Velcro stuff that’s supposedly made for hanging pictures, but never used it because I thought that would probably make just as much mess on the walls (if not more) than knocking nails in. Yesterday I found it, in only the fourth desk drawer I looked in (amazing!) But looking at it now, I can’t believe it would be strong enough – certainly not for the biggest of my black and white Paris photos in the chunky black frames.

Maybe I’ll have a rummage, and see what I’ve got. Some are framed cross stitch and tapestries, which I’d happily consign to the loft. But I must have some things worth hanging.