Hello - Im a builder and a climber with dyspraxia

[mortarmonster]

Hello all
I'm 58 years old, with a PhD, yet I often have to ask my husband to tie my shoe laces or to open things for me. I've only just discovered that there's a name for the way I am!

At school I was good with both numbers and language, but couldn't learn to tell the time, or manage to remember my things. We actually got tested in school when I was 10, and I had the vocabulary of a 15-yr old, but the motor skills of a 5-yr old! In secondary school, the “punishment” for forgetting sports things was to do extra maths; it seemed to take them a very long time to work out that I enjoyed maths, so I would happily sit and solve quadratic equations for an hour...

To this day my short-term memory is terrible, my spatial intelligence subnormal, and I'm always breaking things.

But I have done a couple of things in my life that maybe you wouldn't expect of someone with dyspraxia, and that I think have helped a lot.
Firstly, I have worked all my adult life in construction. In spite of my poor hand-eye co-ordination and my difficulty with reading drawings. I struggled a lot to understand 2-dimensional representations of complex 3-dimensional objects, but in the end I managed to do it well enough to get by. And I think that doing this, rather than only 'playing to my strengths' has improved my skills in that way.

The other thing that has helped me is rock climbing. Being clumsy, badly co-ordinated, and lazy, sport isn't really my thing of course. But I've always liked being outdoors and (via caving, which I took up in order to face down my claustrophobia) I discovered climbing. I'm not especially good at it, but I find something fantastically satisfying about figuring out the best way to use the hand and foot holds with my body.

Anyway, that's quite enough for now. I'm quite excited to discover after all this time that its "a thing" and that there's a forum for it!

[Tom fod]

Hi and welcome to the forum

While there are commonalities we're all unique and tend not to fit any particular mould.