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
