Dyspraxia Awareness Week

As part of Dyspraxia Awareness Week I thought I would write a little about my Dyspraxia and how it has effected me in adulthood. I have wanted to try and do a video on youtube but struggle to get any sort of order in my head to explain what it is I want to say so I'm having to write this instead. Writing isn't the easiest things for me to do but with the aid of my computer and it reading things back to me I have found it the most effective way to get ideas out of my head and onto paper, this is one part of my Dyspraxia that is great and on the other hand the most frustrating thing ever.  When I have an understanding of a topic it becomes very clear in my head and I know what I know is correct. The down side to this is input overload, I can not process to much of the same data at once if a person says the same thing in 3 different ways I get totally lost, the same is also said if someone asks me just how do I feel about a situation I never been in before. I say to myself "how the hell do I know, I've never done that before?" 

I try and keep an open mind to new experiences and plan them as much as I can but with everything in life things never quite work out the way you want them too. A classic example to this is cooking, the amount of skills one needs to cook is way beyond my level of control to give you example of this lets say cooking vegetables? I have poor hand coordination so being able to slice carrots evenly is very difficult then trying to get them into a pan and out again with hot water without spilling it is very hard. I have learnt ways to do this like using a particular handle on a saucepan etc. It does however make the whole process of making myself a meal hard work and something I don't enjoy doing, this is before I have to eat the food afterwards. 

The other area of Dyspraxia that effects me a lot is working memory. transferring ideas from working memory into useable memory is something I find quite difficult. I can start something off with a very clear understanding what it is I want to say or do and within the 3 seconds of understanding it is gone and I struggle to regain that memory back, if all. This makes planning quite difficult as I have to transfer ideas very quickly onto paper or I lose them. I think for me this becomes a benefit as I am able to process very quickly but like I have said I have to be careful not to overload my brain with too much at once or it just shuts down, which it has done a few times already while writing this, and poof there it goes again!! This can make doing things very tiring as I have to put a lot of effort into getting my thoughts organised. I have tried things like Mind Maps and other software but I find them difficult because they don't work fast enough for me. I do however like to do list to plan my day, week or Month out, this insures that I don't forget anything. I think if I could slow down my own thinking my Dyspraxia would be easier to manage but with no one around to help me most of the time to do that I am having to try and do it myself. 

One of the main areas of my Dyspraxia I really like is organising logical events, take for example planning a computer network? I am able to see a bigger picture of just how the whole system works and just what computer has what network IP address and how the hardware and software interacts with everything else on the network. This has been really noticeable in my own home where I have many different systems interacting with other systems that anyone else would struggle to see how it all fits together. This level of awareness of logical systems is quite profound, for some reason I just get it. I have been able to write code for my mobile phone to know where it is and what time of day it is to being able to turn on and off lights, heating,TV, sound systems and even to welcoming me home and turn the kettle on without me even asking it too just because it knows I want a cup of tea when I get home after a long day. 

I think because I am able to understand so many different logical processes I am able to dumb this information down to help others. I currently not working but one job I did enjoy was being a learning support assistant, The classes the teacher would teach where the same most years so I had a good understanding off what it is they wanted to teach the students and for those students who where finding it hard I was able to use the same methods I used on myself when I was learning the same class to help them. The mega down side to this was if I didn't fully understand what is going on it made me next to useless to help the students, and if there is one thing some teachers like to do it's change the lesson plan without telling me leaving me lost. 

Even though my dyspraxia is fairly invisible to most people it can have a huge impact on my day, week or in life with just a small event happening. I going to give you an example that happen the last week. I was due to have an appointment to have my eyes looked at, I planned for my support worker to come with me but then the support worker got cancelled so I ended up trying to go on myself. I ended up with a huge bill for 3 pairs of glasses which two I will rarely use. This I could accept but wasn't the end of the problems it all caused. I took my glasses out of my bag I keep everything in so I could go to the opticians and forgot to put them back. I planned to do this when I got home. I do a voluntary job on a Tuesday night which is the one time I can not work without my glasses because it requires me to do small electrical soldering. My neighbour knocked on my door just as I was about to leave, making me forget to put my glasses in my bag, this meant that I had a wasted trip to my voluntary job because I didn't notice until I got there that I have forgotten to put the glasses back in my bag. I understand we all do things like this but with people who are dyspraxic it becomes more and more common for the most smallest things lead to bigger and bigger things to go wrong. This was one of the main reasons for me losing paid employment. As a volunteer the company did not mind that I couldn't turn up but if I was being paid to be there things would have been much different. all this from just a change of my support worker not coming.

One thing I struggle to get people to understand is someone with dyspraxia I can't just say "oh well" and let these small things go, if I don't get things right then I can't move on and I want to try again and again until I get them right and can't sleep unless I do. When I'm able to manage my Dyspraxia I am able to achieve quite a lot and believe that I should be able to do the same work as everyone else but if I get things wrong not to make an issue as I will beat myself up about it enough without anyone else having a go at me. 

Another thing that makes my day very difficult is once I have planned my day like today if anything changes that I find it difficult to go back to what I am doing. for example 3 times today my phone has rung and I have found it very hard to get back to writing this again, hence this is why it has taken me nearly all day to write. I can't just unplug my phone because I am waiting for the opticians to phone back to tell me if my glasses are ready. I will more of often put on noise cancelling headphones that are connected to my mobile that I can put on restrictive calls and texts notifying the person who has called me that I am busy and to call back later, but I couldn't do this today. I have learnt many different ways to use my mobile from automation to asking it how do I spell a word. 

All too often people only refer to children having dyspraxia and there is huge misunderstanding that adults with dyspraxia also struggle to learn new tasks, more so than children because as we get older things are harder to learn for all of us, for dyspraxic's living in a world that changes all the time makes it very difficult to 'Fit in" In saying this I have found that I have loved working within research and development, this is because there isn't any set 'rules' if anything I will come up with an idea much quicker than other people. I have learnt over my time to be able to pass that idea off to someone slower than I would be able to process it myself which is slightly ironic I think considering if some else is trying to explain an idea that I can't understand myself it takes me ages to 'get it' I do however find it difficult to slow down because I am scared I going to forget what I want to say to people and often do.  

Lastly I would like to talk about reading or more importantly the written language. even though I have written this all myself there is no way in the world I can read it back. this concept of not being able to read what you have written is really strange even to me. I have tried so many different methods over my years and have settled with a computer generated male voice to read this back. I have tried female voices but find there is too much variation within a female voice on computers when read long passages of text, however in saying that my phone has a female voice but I think that is just because I like to be spoken to by a female voice where I consider the computer my own voice so would just sound strange if it was a female.  

I think this is enough now because I have made myself very tired trying to get all of what I think is important to help people understand the aspects of dyspraxia within adults from my own experiences. there are many other parts of my dyspraxia I could talk about but in short I have a good verbal understanding of things but translating that understanding into practice is difficult. I only hope you can all understand this as much as I do and it is clear.