I am not clumsy, I am dyspraxic

I have a Master’s degree but I can’t remember directions.

I struggle with shoe laces, buttons and tin openers.

I can’t catch or dance in time or walk in a straight line.

I have dyspraxia, or, as it is sometimes known, developmental coordination disorder.

Have you ever heard of it? You have probably heard of dyslexia (which I also have), ADHD, maybe even dyscalculia. But the only people I know who have heard of dyspraxia are the people who have it or know someone who has it.

Yet it’s pretty common, 5% of people or one in every classroom/workplace have it. Celebrities Daniel Radcliffe, Cara Delevingne and Florence Welch have it. We are the "clumsy kids", the ones who can’t ride a bike, the ones with terrible handwriting, the ones who no one wants on their sports team.

Around 70% of those affected are male (though not me!) and it can run in families (we think maybe my dad though he has never been tested). Defined as a lifelong neurological disorder, it primarily affects motor function (e.g., the ability to eat, speak, and move), alongside a treasure trove of other developmental symptoms. The disorder boils down to this: not all of the messages your brain is sending to your body are getting through. How this presents itself varies from person to person.

For me it was always the little things that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I tried and tried to learn to ride a bike but while all my friends picked it up quickly, I always fell off.  I am always walking into doorways, walls, people, furniture. I am always get lost all the time, not just when I was going somewhere new, but when I am trying to remember a route I have done many times before. 

I was lucky, I was diagnosed when I was young. I was given support lessons at school (which involved a lot of weird physical exercises), I read everything I could find on the topic (which wasn’t much), my parents supported me to focus on my talents, I got in touch with the Dyspraxic Foundation who helped me feel less alone and less weird. But I still struggled with it emotionally, I felt limited, strange and like my body wasn’t on my side. I used to love watching people do things I felt excluded from, it took me a while to come to terms with my body, my abilities and my limits.

But many others deal with the emotional and physical challenges of being different without an explanation. Sadly, the condition is often under-diagnosed or misdiagnosed. "Few physicians and parents and teachers are even aware of developmental motor disorders,” says Deborah Dewey, a University of Calgary professor who specializes in this kind of research.

Many of these children and later adults struggle with this feeling of being different their whole lives. Though its symptoms may appear to be mostly physical, dyspraxia is about mental processing as much as physical coordination, and affects everything from the way I read to how I organise my thoughts. 

We are often labelled lazy, clumsy or unintelligent by people who don’t see the whole picture. It is called “a hidden disability” for a reason. I have long made a point of being open about my dyspraxia, every time someone comments on my spilling a drink or bumping into something, I try to explain and spread the word wherever I can. I want people to know and understand the word when they hear it.

The misunderstanding is not just around dyspraxia, everyone with specific learning difficulties will know: people don’t understand their seriousness, and people don’t understand how they can coexist with excellence. We still see intelligence as linear, with levels of success, rather than a spectrum where you might be brilliant in some areas and require support in others. There is more than one type of intelligence, don’t trust anyone who says otherwise.

I remember learning to read and being unable to understand the way my teacher taught it. Instead I learned to read by memorising what each word looked like, that made sense to me. Now I am in two book clubs and I read as part of my job, I made up for my slow start pretty quickly.

Of course, I have lost count of the amount of people who have told me dyspraxia and other specific learning difficulties are not a “real thing”. But I tend to find people say that about things they don’t understand.

Society is hard on people who are different. Those with dyspraxia are over-represented in the criminal justice and mental health systems. According to the Dyspraxia Foundation, an undiagnosed dyspraxic child is five times more likely than an average child to suffer from mental health problems by the age of 16.

I want to tell those children, it does get easier with age. As I have reached adulthood my dyspraxia hasn’t disappeared but it is less obvious. Mostly because I have found coping mechanism, I don’t even notice the weird way I do some things until someone points it out. Also you know the best thing about adulthood? You can shape your environment to suit you. My environment is one with no ball games, no bikes, no skiing, limited shoelaces and buttons, where I have Citymapper to direct me and a computer to type on.

Best of all it is an environment where people love me and celebrate me for all my quirks. It is an environment where I get to be a bit special and a bit different and that be ok. We dyspraxics are creative, empathic, determined, motivated and problem solvers. We can be pretty great.

If you think you may have dyspraxia, you can not be formally diagnose without a clinical examination but here is a checklist to give you some idea.