Apart from not being very tall, skinny or possessing overly-developed cheekbones, the other thing that prevented me from making a career as a catwalk model is that I’m quite clumsy. I drop things, trip over my own feet, bump into doorways and I have bruised hips from a lifetime of bumping into tables. I also have poor hand-eye coordination so I was never good at ball games. I’ve never worried too much about any of this and have just got on with being a bit less than elegant.
Yesterday I was at my Pilates class at the gym and my instructor was getting really frustrated by my inability to perform a simple maneuver without falling over and losing my balance. I thought it was hilarious because I really don’t have good balance and I wasn’t too worried if I couldn’t do the exercise and we’d move onto something else. At the end of the session he asked me if I thought I could be dyspraxic. No. I couldn’t be, I’m just clumsy. I was about to go into a rant about applying labels to people who just do normal things not as well as other people might do them but I couldn’t be bothered because I needed a shower.
(Something that annoys me beyond what is reasonable is when people who aren’t very good at spelling have persuaded themselves that they’re dyslexic.)
I was the opposite when I heard about dyspraxia – I wasn’t just being stupid whenever I’ve been reduced to tears trying to work out a map, or couldn’t work out left from right – my brain just isn’t equipped to do that.
Although I did have a similar reaction as you when my Spanish teacher took me on one side for a quiet word to ask if I might be dyslexic.
By: badmissk on November 29, 2011
at 9:30 am
I genuinely do not believe that I have dyspraxia – I think I rush about too much and don’t concentrate on what I’m doing. When I was working in the UK I saw students who had dyspraxia and how it made some things very difficult for them – in the same way that I saw lots of students who had very real problems with dyslexia and hearing someone who couldn’t be bothered to run the spell check or look in a dictionary telling me that they were (a bit) dyslexic undermined the real problems of those who truly did have dyslexia.
By: tabliope on November 29, 2011
at 12:09 pm
It’s fascinating (from my linguistic perspective) just how much dyslexia can affect people – it has a big impact on short term memory, which I didn’t know about (not so fascinating when you’re struggling to work out what’s being asked in a job interview).
One of my nephews was diagnosed as speech dyspraxic – he’s more or less ok now but it took a long time and years of speech therapy before he could actually talk so we could understand him.
By: badmissk on November 29, 2011
at 2:57 pm
And not just dyslexic – ‘a bit’ dyslexic. Aargh.
By: foxinthesnow on November 29, 2011
at 10:51 am