My name's Becki Sparks. I'm 27 years old. My hobbies in life are reading and writing, I get a lot of joy out of character building and developing plots. Especially when they're dramatic. I guess this is also inflamed by me watching a couple of soaps and witnesses complex character development and stuff like that.
I assume I was diagnosed with dyspraxia when I was nine years old. According to my mother, it was a teacher who pointed it out. I don't remember the official diagnosis or really being aware of this until I was at a careers meeting at 14/15 and the issue coming up then. Of course, I was aware that I had had some issues with my hands; struggling with laces, appalling handwriting, terrible coordination with catching etc. Even with those two meetings, the only other session regarding it was a single occupational therapy session aged 11. And I must have assumed it was just an ordinary thing since I don't remember knowing anything about dyspraxia at that age. But I was always told it was mild. So sometimes I didn't bother bringing it up in conversation - it didn't affect me that much anyway.
A few years ago when I was volunteering in a school where my mum also worked, there was a lot more awareness of dyspraxia then and it was nice to see. But my mum brought my attention to other ways in which dyspraxia plays a part even in my life. She looked at the poster and she was like "Some of these are you." I only glanced at it but I immediately saw one which resonated - repeating things in speech. That is definitely me. At the time I was more curious but I didn't pursue learning about anything else.
I have looked up the dyspraxia foundation site, especially the page for adults, once every few years. But again, I wasn't too worried
However in the last year, I've had more problems with my grip. Nothing horribly drastic but noticeable. My struggles like that are usually very rare but it's been cropping up more and more. So I thought I'd check out the dyspraxia foundation website again to see if it was possible for dyspraxia to get worse over time. What I ended up seeing instead was the adults page again. Only this time it was far more comprehensive and I was shocked at how much of it actually applied to me. It's not so much the perception aspects as it is: motor coordination (to some degree), speech and language (hell yes), eye movements (yeah, somewhat), learning and memory (been there, done that), and emotions.
And in a way, that's truly frightening.
I've never had much self-esteem, especially not in the last ten years. Over half of the things on that list that I associate with me, were things that I blamed on me just being a sucky person. And even realising how much dyspraxia has influenced me can't change years of feeling that way. But it's more unnerving to know that if I'd have known that many of the things I hated about myself were down to dyspraxia, things could have been very different.
What was even more interesting is that most of it has only applied to me over the last ten years. I'm pretty sure I didn't have half of these issues over ten years ago. So it leads me to wonder if a person's dyspraxia can develop more over the years.