Author Topic: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?  (Read 499 times)

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Offline Jack

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Re: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?
« Reply #15 on: September 23, 2016, 01:28:42 PM »
I used to be told I was like a bull in a china shop.  :LOL:
Mom used to say that too, and make jokes about hearing the furniture conspiring in the night about whose turn it was to bite me next. Never really considered lack of coordination to be a problem, though. Life doesn't seem to require many graceful things.

Offline Walkie

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Re: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?
« Reply #16 on: September 23, 2016, 08:21:17 PM »
I did a lot when I was young. I even had special ed services back in the 70s in part because I could hardly write do to poor hand eye coordination.  They had me do special hand and writing exercises for what seemed like ages it worked to a point but I hated it.  When I was 15 I was obsessed with learning  to  juggle,  first with balls then pins.  It took what seemed like forever with sometimes three or four hours a day of practice but eventually I got it.  After that it was walking on stilts with the same rigorous practice.   All the practicing really helped a lot not just with those tasks but my overall coordination though I still have my moments.   

At primary school, my writing was so bad that only my class  teacher could read it. I couldn't learn to hold the pen properly , so I made a fist round it . Besides the discoordination( which made my writing extremely messy) it was also full of dyslexic spellings and stretches of moirror-writing (cos I couldn't tell left from right").  I wrote "d" as "b" etc. I more-or-less overcame that by my early teens, I figured that was down to loads of practice, and also my inspired  new technique of writinng all the problematical letters "backwards" every time (which transpired to mean  forwards, in effect). I now suspect that the onrush of female hormones was more of a factor.  I think they masked a lot of my issues, to some degree, whilst they were flowing. But that's just an educated guess.

I also have a related speech impediment called "lazy tongue" . I had no idea there was a word for it until my son was referred, by his school, for speech therapy. The therapist said there was nothing wrong with his speech, he was just copying me! Then she explained that it caused by  a defect in fine motor control  and was common in dyslexic people; and then she taught me a couple of tricks for diguising it.  Prior to that, i'd thought that inside of  my mouth must be an unusual shape.

And yeah, even in my teens I bumped my head several times a day and slipped and fell down the polished wooden stairs on the way to School Assembly every morning. Etc I  never grew out of that.

The worrying thing in recent years  was i started to notitice my clumsiness was ibncreasing , to the point that "ataxia" is now a more approp[riate descriptor than Dyspraxia.  But when i first went to my GP with it , she ran some tests and could see no evidence of clumsiness at all.   I was nonplussed by this, and decided it must be that the problem was episodic.  Much later it struck me that I pased the  test for the exact same reason that I pass practically all tests: I was able to focus exclusively on the narrow task in hand to the exclusion of everything else. This isn't very useful in practice. When I'm walking down the street its better to pay attention to thing you'#re about to trip over collide with than to focus on the act of walking, isn't it?  What was it Icequeen said? She "can't walk and chew gum  ", Ditto. I can't walk and do anything else same time, not even think. If some interesting though t comes to mind whilst walking I either grind to a halt, unconsciously, or else keep on walking automatically, without the slightest awareness of my surroundings.   I've come close to getting killed  numerous times, according to witnesses, and close to causing traffic pile-ups; yet  somehow, the predictable disaster has never yet ensued.

Clearly , that's an Attention  issue, or Executive Function thing  isn't it? But they're all related. I'm coming to think that the the boundaries between the 20-ish neurological conditions that I could be diagnosed with are totally artificial. There's loads of overlap in the symtomology.  There's got to be a way to simplify it down.

I also have APD (Auditory Processing Disorder), which basically means fuzzy hearing, due to neueological dysfunction. I'll bet loads of other here have the same. I first heard about it on an Aspie forum. Before that, I thought I was uniquely  weird and that nobody else was ever gonna understand why I can't make out what they;'re saying without switching the running tap off first...or exiting the noisy coffee bar, ofc.  Or, hang on, sometimes I can  hear OK; all these issues are variable in intensity.  But, alarmingly, they are all getting significantly  worse  overall , now that I'm past my menopause.  Female hormones not masking them anymore?

Ok , Ok, so I'm a neurological mess, but I'd still rasther be me than NT. NT's are different sort of neurological mess, IMO; and neurotypicality is equally incurable.

-Walkie :)
« Last Edit: September 23, 2016, 08:25:37 PM by DrunkardsWalk »

Offline DirtDawg

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Re: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?
« Reply #17 on: September 24, 2016, 01:04:05 AM »
I trip over my own feet,   (edit)

Don't worry about it Graelwyn, you've got lots of company. Focus on the good stuff.

I have gotten much better at not hurting myself.

For the past year I have allowed my beard to grow out quite a bit.  It does not hang down like ZZ Top; it sticks straight out, like a scary clown Santa. I sometimes catch it by surprise in my peripheral vision and half stumble/trip over nothing. I see it and correct my step, but there is nothing by my feet, so I look really stupid.

I just shrug and smile when I am seen.

Agreed, Graelwyn. Do not worry. A shrug and a smile can go a long way.
Jimi Hendrix: When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. 

Ghandi: Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

The end result of life's daily pain and suffering, trials and failures, tears and laughter, readings and listenings is an accumulation of wisdom in its purest form.

Offline Natalia Evans

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Re: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?
« Reply #18 on: October 08, 2016, 12:43:42 AM »
Occupational therapy fixed my coordination but I dropped stuff into my early twenties or late teens and I still have a habit of looking at the ground when I walk because as a child I would keep bumping into little kids so I learned to look at the ground so I would move my body before I bump into them. My Game Boy survived many falls and so did my GBA but its battery cover didn't survive.

Walking on the treadmill definitely helps.

Offline renaeden

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Re: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?
« Reply #19 on: October 08, 2016, 12:50:44 AM »
Good to see you, Natalia. And good use of the word "its". One of my teachers at college can't even get that right.
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Offline Grey Area

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Re: Do You Struggle With Co-Ordination ?
« Reply #20 on: December 14, 2016, 10:25:35 PM »
I was so bad at sports at school that my teachers didn't mind when I stopped turning up to PE lessons for the last two years of high school. I solved my problem with coordination by not undertaking any activities that require it.
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