How Dyspraxia feeds my anxiety

I’m starting this post on the first anniversary of receiving the report of my assessment for Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD), the clinical term for dyspraxia. My report was very conclusive:

‘He demonstrated great difficulties with coordinating gross motor skills, fine motor skills, balance, visual-motor skills and sensory processing. These significantly impact on his ability to participate in a range of daily living activities including self-care, productivity at home, work and leisure.’

This brought home to me that there is too much dyspraxia-associated anxiety in my life. My assessor told me that many people with dyspraxia experience anxiety because of their problems coping with a world which doesn’t allow for their needs. The NHS website confirms the link between dyspraxia and mental health conditions.

Many practical aspects of life make me very anxious. One example is that my hands don’t work as well as they should. They have no physical defects; the problem is that they won’t necessarily go where I want them to. And when they finally reach the right position, they don’t usually do what I tell them. This means that I can’t properly undertake physical activities such as sport and DIY. If I have to try them, I get very scared. Some years ago a group of us at work volunteered to paint the inside of a community hall. I still cringe at my pathetic efforts to put the paint in the right place. The warden of the hall was very patient with us but I kept getting things wrong. Luckily my colleagues were much more capable than me. and overpainted my mistakes.

My poor practical skills have led to my house being a mess. Family and friends have helped me but the mess still remains. I don’t always maintain the improvements they’ve introduced. I know that I should try some DIY, and there are no doubt many instructional videos on YouTube. I know that people just ‘have a go’ at difficult things and succeed, but I can’t persuade myself to even try. The consequences could be worse than the situation is now.

And that’s why my house is in such a horrible state. I am ashamed of it, and worry about what people will think if they come in.

My anxiety makes it virtually impossible to ring up tradespeople to get them to do jobs. I know they will ask me questions I don’t know the answer to. Typically for a dyspraxic, I find it difficult to answer sudden unexpected questions. However I recently had a positive experience with one of the on-line trades sites. That is progress.

I would be interested to know how other people cope with their lack of practical skills.

My dyspraxia development

(Published in Dyspraxia & Life June 2019)

I’m going to talk about my experiences of dyspraxia during two very different periods of my life.

The first period was when I was at boarding school in the 1970s. The school placed a lot of emphasis on sport which was a nightmare for me. My physical coordination is appalling. My inability to move my hands and legs into the right positions made PE lessons impossible. My attempts to climb ropes in the gym were farcical.

Cricket was my favourite sport but this didn’t make any difference; I was still useless. I knew where to place my bat to hit the ball hard, but the instructions that my brain sent to my hands were faulty. I kept failing and feeling wretched.

Another problem was my handwriting. I have to admit that it’s atrocious. At school, I was told that I would never get anywhere unless people could read my writing. I was sent for remedial lessons to an irascible chemistry teacher, who made me write pages of italic letters with a big pencil with a very flat lead. Why? It made no difference. Luckily the introduction of computers helped me. I don’t have to write now, if I don’t want to.

In 2017, when I’d reached the age of 57, there was a positive development. Through a friend who has dyslexia, I learnt about dyspraxia. When I first read the list of its typical indications, I thought ‘That’s me’. It was a revelation. I immediately recognised that I suffer from many of the problems that are common with dyspraxia, for instance my personal organisation at work. I have to manage large quantities of fast changing information and this is very challenging. Working out priorities and sticking to them is really difficult. I’m good at starting tasks and very poor at finishing them. My typing is messy and I can’t see my mistakes. Sometimes I miss out whole words even though my brain tells me I’ve typed them.

On a hot day last summer I had an assessment with an occupational therapist. This clearly confirmed that I have dyspraxia.

Work has given a lot of support including mind mapping, text-to-speech and speech-to-text software. The IT is great for helping me organise myself. I now prioritise my to-do list using a mind map, with all my tasks colour -coded. It only takes a few seconds to see what I’m meant to be doing next. The bright colours make the tasks seem more ‘friendly’ and less of a threat.

I have also received free coaching. As well as helping me with practical issues, my coach has encouraged me to come to terms with my diagnosis. She wants me to focus on my strengths rather than what I can’t do.

Anxiety has plagued me throughout my life. Partly this is because I can’t do many things that ‘normal’ people can. I hope that my new knowledge of dyspraxia will help me realise that not all my failures are my fault.

Flaws and Snags

I’m a keen book reader and have just finished the second novel by the American novelist Donna Tartt called ‘The Little Friend’. It’s set in Mississippi in the 1970s and is as disturbing as it is compellingly readable.

One sentence in the book really hit home. A character called Allison was “disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality for which there was no logical explanation”. This happens to me: like Allison, I am constantly puzzled by finding inanimate objects in places that logically they cannot be, taking into account their previous position and the laws of physics. Sometimes things mysteriously disappear right in front of me. Or they appear from nowhere.

I’m still worried about an event of this kind that happened a very long time ago. Any reasonable person would have forgotten what happened so long ago but not me.

In my early days at University I lost my room keys. I was locked into my room so I knew that the keys should still be inside it. But I couldn’t find the keys anywhere, however frantically I looked. It was a small room. In those days none of the rooms were en-suite so there was little more than a bed, a chair and a desk. I desperately searched in and under my bedclothes but there was nothing there. I searched and searched again and eventually found my keys – in a place where I know I’d searched before.

Glad as I was to find them, I was mystified and upset that they appeared somewhere I’d already looked.

I once saw a CBT counsellor who kindly carried out an email survey of his friends, most of whom confirmed that they’d lost keys at some point in their lives. Many found them somewhere they thought they’d already checked. My counsellor intended to demonstrate to me that everyone has the same experience as me. Perhaps that’s what they believe. Unlike Allison, they don’t truly understand that there are flaws and snags in the fabric of reality.

Is anyone else haunted by seemingly irrational events like these? Please tell me that Allison and I aren’t alone.

Noise!!

Someone dropped a wooden tray in a cafe the other day, and I said to my friend “I would be happier if I knew that I would never hear someone drop a tray again.” There was no breakable crockery on the tray but the noise was sudden and loud and came as a shock.

A work event was ruined for me by the problems the presenter experienced with the microphone. The volume kept going up and down, leading to deafening surges of electronic screeches. I thought to myself: after all these decades of technology developments, why don’t microphones work properly? The first microphone was invented 140 years ago!

When I was walking to the station at 6.30 the other morning, the driver of a white van decided that a car had taken a split-second longer than it should have to move away from the traffic lights. The van driver sounded his horn several times and very loudly. What’s the point? It was early in the morning. The streets are quiet at that time.

I’ve lived in London for years so am used to the constant background noise. Perhaps I’d find empty countryside too quiet. But since I had a strong attack of depression in 2008 I’ve become very sensitive to noise. And it really feels as if sudden noise follows me around. Every time I go to the pub sometimes knocks over their beer and smashes their glass.

My cat and I hear strange loud noises in the house. We look at each other, frightened. Neither of us can understand what these noises are. There is never any explanation.

A few weeks ago I was in a busy pub and the table next door was very cheerful. Each successive joke was greeted with gales of laughter. I’m always surprised by how loudly people laugh. I know I need to accept that most people display emotion more expressively than me. However I couldn’t understand why people had to clap their hands and slap the table each time there was an amusing comment. It was so unnecessarily deafening.

These may seem trivial issues to many. They’re shocking to me. Other people’s noise reduces the grip I have over my world. When sound of loud music from next door spills into my house I feel threatened. It feels like my neighbour’s personality has expanded while mine has reduced to a tiny size. Luckily the music is usually bearable at the moment but at one time it nearly led me to do something dreadful. It could start up again any day.

Lost in a cloud of intentions

Sometimes I feel that my mind is floating helplessly in a cloud of other people’s motives and intentions, being buffeted from side to side. Other people seem to know where they’re going, but I drift aimlessly.

Because I’m lost in this cloud, I feel that I have very little understanding of people’s motives. What do they intend to do and why?

To add to my confusion, those motives and intentions often seem inconsistent. I find myself thinking ‘If person A thinks like that, why do they do this?’ Or ‘Person B said X two weeks ago. Why are they now saying Y which is completely contradictory?’ Why aren’t people consistent? It doesn’t seem much to ask.

Birds are much easier to understand. I love their predictability. In the spring, swallows and swifts arrive from Africa. In autumn, it’s the turn of colourful ducks from Northern Europe.

I’m going to describe two incidents from some time ago which still leave me puzzled and upset. Worse still, they still give me painful flashbacks. They both relate to my time at university. In my first few days there, I met a woman and suddenly life was wonderful. But this only lasted a couple of days. We went to a sci-fi discussion group where you could only speak if you were holding a soft toy someone had thrown to you. By the end of the evening, she’d identified that one of the group was more interesting than me. By the next day, she was going out with him and I was rejected.

What was I to do?

This event immediately put me in a spiral of depression which lasted the whole year. University seemed to be a very unsympathetic place. There was no room for anyone who wasn’t having an amazing time.

Looking back on this now I wish that I’d made more of that year. I was very privileged to go to university. I did my coursework. But the year was ruined as soon as it began. I had never realised that it was possible to feel so isolated when surrounded by so many people.

The next academic year started better when I moved out of the campus to student accommodation. After a while, I developed a friendship with one of the students there. It was an informal supportive friendship. We went to films and parties together and I enjoyed not having to do things by myself. He helped me develop other friendships and the loneliness of my first year slowly disappeared.

He went to Spain for a while, and invited me to visit him. I’ve always had travel anxiety. I just about coped with the long coach journey but found it difficult being so far from home. My friend and I visited Madrid, a beautiful city, but the hottest place I’d ever been. It was there that my friend suddenly turned to me and said sternly and angrily that I shouldn’t look so worried when people spoke to me. If I didn’t change, then people would take advantage of me. I had never heard him speak like that to me. Perhaps he was trying to give me well-meaning advice. If someone asked me that now, I could reply ‘I have been diagnosed with anxiety, my behaviour is indicative of that anxiety, I’m trying to do my best’. But then I had no words.

Didn’t he for one moment realise that speaking so angrily would have a devastating effect on me?

Does Time Fly?

According to this beautiful memorial and drinking fountain, time certainly does fly. I found it in Kensington Gardens in London. I feel safe and relaxed in this beautiful green park. Having spent hours wandering round it, I thought I knew all its monuments. So I was surprised but delighted to stumble on this memorial on the northern edge of the park.

The date of the building is certain – 1909. The inscription is moving: ‘To the memory of a beloved son and of one who loved little children’.

According to the London Remembers website, it is not certain whom these words refer to. Their sincerity is clear, however.

Why ‘Time flies ’? Perhaps the inscription is hopeful: the passing of time will ease the pain of loss. Alternatively, the writer might be warning us that we are mortal: time’s onward march will claim us all one day.

It seems that there is nothing we can do about time’s inevitable progress. This BBC article explains why; it’s a very readable summary of the complex science. We always perceive time as going forward: if you push a coffee mug off a table, it will break and scatter liquid all over the carpet. Sadly, there is no possibility of time reversing itself and the mug jumping back on again. I know this to my cost, with both coffee mugs and beer glasses!

Unsurprisingly that doesn’t seem to be the whole picture; as the article says, the laws of physics apply equally to the past and future. A similar theme is the basis of one of my favourite films, a science fiction story called ‘Arrival’, released in 2016. The film, based on a short story by Ted Chiang, explores the idea of ‘non-linear time’. This is the concept of being able to see the past, present and future at the same time. In the movie, the main character Louise Banks says to another ‘Ian, if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?’

It’s surprising to find a character in a film called Ian! Somehow it makes the question more personal to me. If I was asked about the past, I would answer that I wish that I’d been been outgoing and capable. I wish I’d been good with my hands.

I’d like to know my future, even if I couldn’t change it. My ability to cope with everyday life is constantly challenged by unexpected events. Life would be easier if I could know what was to come, even if I discovered that I didn’t have a long time to go. Depression has made me very pessimistic about life and I don’t foresee much joy in the future. However if the future was set out in front of me, I could at least prepare for its grief and challenges.

What about you? Would you like to know your future?

Clumsy or stupid?

It’s become clear to me that my physical inadequacies have contributed to my poor mental health. My physical coordination is appalling.

For example, I had – and still have – very bad handwriting. This caused me huge problems at school. My primary school insisted that we wrote in italic lettering. My awkward hands were quite unable to achieve the precision required for this script. My teachers insistently complained about my writing but I was never able to help them by magically improving. They just thought I was being lazy.

At boarding school, everything got even worse. I was always told ‘You’ll never get anywhere Young, unless people can read your writing.’ I was sent for remedial lessons to an irascible chemistry teacher, who made me write pages of italic letters with a big pencil with a very flat lead. Why? It made no difference. Luckily someone invented word processing. This really helped. Handwriting quickly became a minority hobby rather than a necessity.

My inability to move my hands and legs into the right positions made PE (Physical Education) lessons impossible. We were meant to climb ropes in the gym and I gamely grabbed one . But the rope stared at me, and I stared at the rope, and we both realised that any further effort on my part was pointless.

My boarding school was sports-dominated, but I was too weak and uncoordinated to succeed. My main memory of rugby was standing out in freezing playing fields, then rushing back for hot showers, only to experience nagging pain when my hands warmed up. (Does anyone know why this happens?)

I hated rugby but I loved cricket. This didn’t make any difference; I was still useless. I knew where to place my bat to hit the ball hard, but the instructions that my brain sent to my hands were faulty. I kept failing and feeling wretched. One day I was fielding in a cricket game. I was faced with the simple task of returning the ball from the boundary to the middle. For some reason, I chose to throw the ball underarm and watched with horror as it curved backwards high over my head. Everyone laughed. I put my head in my hands. I was teased mercilessly about my stupidity. By the time everybody had forgotten about it, the story of my disgrace appeared in the school magazine and the teasing started all over again.

I was always the last person to be chosen by other pupils for sports teams. I dreaded this weekly humiliation. This is an American blog: the title ‘Being the last one picked in gym class really messes you up’ says it all.

My coordination problems also surfaced in metalwork and woodwork and I was quite unable to turn pieces of wood into mortise and tenon joints. The impatient teachers couldn’t understand why I struggled. Apparently everyone else found it easy.

My teachers never made allowances for pupils who struggled with their physical abilities.

My belief that I am a really inadequate person started here at school. The effects have lasted throughout my life.

What happened to my Boarding House?

At boarding school, I lived out of the main building, in an outlying boarding house. It may have been an attractive building but I hated it. I remember how frightened I was when I went inside for the first time. There were boys and worried parents rushing around, and everything was unfamiliar.

Over the next few weeks, I got to know the house. It was a terrible place to live. The smell of floor polish and old food lingers with me.

The dormitories were the most frightening feature of the boarding house. At home I had a comfortable bed in my quiet familiar bedroom but here I had to share a big room with over 20 boys I didn’t know. There were even bunk beds! The noise was sometimes unbearable. The mattresses were thin and uncomfortable. As a child became more senior in the school, dormitories became smaller, but it wasn’t until long after I left that they were replaced by ‘cubicles’. There was no privacy at all in the dormitories and hardly any privacy anywhere in the school.

A less tangible but even more painful memory was the teasing I and others boys received. I always expected some teasing, but at my previous school it had always been good natured. Here it turned more and more personal and painful. To me, it felt like bullying. Sometimes there was a physical element to it. Why did boys want to bully each other? Some of the bullies thrived at school. They probably succeeded after school, becoming high flyers in industry or

government. I was left as a wreck.

That boarding house was the first place I experienced depression. I had no real idea what was happening to me, except that it was horrible. There was no recognition of the condition within the school and no support for sufferers.

When I recently visited the village with a friend, we walked up to the boarding house but found this empty space instead:

We were puzzled until I remembered that the building had been badly damaged by fire a few years before. It was out of term time, and everyone in the building was evacuated safely. I assumed that the house would be rebuilt but I was wrong. It was decided to build a new boarding house nearby and demolish the damaged building leaving a wide open space. I was amazed. This building where I had experienced so much homesickness and fear had just disappeared. The walls which had witnessed my first encounters with depression had been demolished.

I was pleased that I’d outlived the building, though the pain it caused me still remains in my mind even now.

Boarding School

I went to boarding school between the ages of 13 and 18. For much of that time, I hated the school. I have often thought that my experiences there burnt out my ability to be happy. Many former pupils turned out to be supremely self-confident, leaders of the country or great sports people. I turned out to be timid, shy, shrivelled. Any confidence that I had in my intellectual ability was destroyed by my inability to cope with the unfeeling authority of the school’s regime.

It is said that if you survived boarding school you could survive anything. But my experiences at boarding school have made me less capable of dealing with anything. The depression that I developed there has never fully gone away. All I can do is manage it with medication and counselling.

I didn’t feel prepared for boarding school. My only knowledge was from novels. I read many of the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. These were light-hearted stories about children at a school in Sussex. When I tried to read one of these books at my boarding school, a prefect told me that this wasn’t acceptable reading. The only other book I had was about the Impressionist painters. To this day, I’ve found it very difficult to like them.

I also read part of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ by Thomas Hughes, an 1857 novel written in praise of Rugby School but which contains some horrible scenes of bullying. I was bullied at school but not to the extent of Tom Brown. He was ‘roasted’ in front of a fire.

One of my early memories of school was being told that my hair was too long. There was an on-site hairdresser who sorted this out. I was really upset. My hair wasn’t very long but it was longer than the short back-and-sides required by the school rules. I couldn’t believe this. If my parents were happy with the length of my hair, what right did the school have to say otherwise?

I plan to write more about my time at boarding school.

Talking

Sometimes it’s so difficult to talk. Words and words go round in my mind, but I don’t know how to express them. I have very little faith in what I say, and I’m so worried that I’ll say something wrong, offensive or useless. After I’ve had a conversation with someone, I’ll hurriedly review it so I know what mistakes I’ve made and whether I can correct them before it’s too late. Usually not.

When my depression is bad, it is impossible for me to say anything, and at best I rehearse words, replies and sentences to myself without ever saying anything out loud. My words will be meaningless. Too often, this happens when I’m a group of people, and everyone else seems eloquent, happy and relaxed, while my mind is tied up in black knots.

I was always shy. The symptoms of social anxiety disorder are very familiar to me. At one time, it looked as if a CBT therapist was going to treat me for it, but the treatment would have been worse than the pain. It would have followed the “Heimberg model”– “graduated exposure to feared social situations”. My therapist said that I would have to go out and have a deliberate disagreement with a shop assistant about something. Horror! I’d rather climb Everest. She took pity on my expression of fear-soaked agony, and my CBT went in another direction.

Because I fail to talk adequately, I’ve missed out on fun, social occasions, friends and probably even relationships. But, strangely, the one thing I can talk about more fluently is my own mental health problems. I’m not an expert on anxiety and depression, but I can speak about what it feels like to be me. At work, with the help of trusted colleagues, I’ve found opportunities to do so. Recently a colleague and I gave a talk at work about mental health in the workplace. I’ve been told that that, by speaking openly, I have helped others. I really hope this is true.