In the post-waking and pre-getting up time between 4:30 and 7:00 this morning, because I hadn’t yet started reading anything new on the Kindle, or downloaded the next bit of the podcast I’m listening to (I have to do that in the wifi area, ie front room or study), I was browsing Facebook. On the dyspraxia group there was a post from a 77-year old lady whom I’ve chatted to before (let’s call her Jane, because that’s not her name), with a photo of a letter explaining to her that she isn’t entitled to a diagnosis on the NHS. I feel bad for her, because she can’t afford to get one privately, as I did, but she wants to be assessed to convince her family that she has real problems and isn’t just being difficult, in order to improve her relationships with them, who apparently don’t treat her very well.
But from my experience, quite honestly, my expensive diagnosis doesn’t hold much water with most of the people I’ve tried to explain it to – which is hardly surprising, because, hey, I’m dyspraxic, and not being able to explain things clearly and convincingly is part of who I am. Because there’s so little awareness, and because it’s in many ways more nebulous than, say, dyslexia or ADHD, and the ‘symptoms’ (poor short term memory, poor organisation, poor punctuality, problems with absorbing and processing information which manifest as not listening, not paying attention etc etc etc) appear as the kind of ticks and habits which are frustrating both for the dyspraxic individual and the people they come into contact with – the kind of habits that for most people can be overcome with a little thought and effort, but for someone like me appear insurmountable…
What was I saying before I launched into that mammoth sentence? Oh yes, convincing people that these are real problems that are hard for you to manage, and can they please cut you some slack. Even my therapist doesn’t always get how hard it is to find people who will respond positively to this. She once said: ‘But you have a severe learning disability and you can prove it because you’ve been formally assessed’ – which raises the question: how can that be true when I also have a PhD? (although nobody takes that seriously either). The brain (anybody’s brain, not just mine) is a huge mystery, and the more we learn about it the less it all seems to make sense.
I started wanting to write a comment to my Facebook friend Jane, to tell her that having a diagnosis probably wouldn’t improve her relationships with her family, and the support she gets from the Facebook group is likely to be more valuable. Mine hasn’t allowed me to go back and make more of the opportunities I missed, or help me find new ones, or taken away the sense that my life has been a bit of a shambles – it’s just part of an explanation of why I’m me.