Aloha ^_^ ! Tokis here :D (< Loooooong post warning BTW!)
Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2012 8:15 pm
Hiya, just joined 
! Some of my life story (you can totally skip it you want, its very long so if you "TLDR" i can totally understand that 
) ^_^v ;
I was first diagnosed with Dysphraxia around about the age of 7. I don't really remember much about it (it was a long time ago) expect that one day my mum told me that i was Dysphraxic. It was also around this time that my (2 years older) brother was diagnosed with having very strong Dyslexia.
But while my brother was given a great deal of help & attention about his Dyslexia (shortly afterwards at age 9 he was sent off to a special full time boarding school for Dyslexic boys and was doted on even more by mother etc) i was given no help whatsoever.
The condition was not even properly explained to me, and rather than help me, my mother just ridiculed me and made fun of me for it (i kid you not! She is a very disturbed woman, one big walking personality disorder, and played a horrible favouritism between me & my bro etc), making jokes at me etc (for example if it tripped over something or walked in a flat footed manner she would say "Dysphraxic! Dysphraxic! Dysphraxic!" in a high pitched parrot like voice & poked me in the side for it etc.
As a consequence, from a young age i got the impression that although i did not know much about Dysphraxia, it wasn't something you told people you add or asked questions about, rather, it was something to be hidden & ashamed of.
So i went through most of my life struggling with the symptoms of Dysphraxia, never understanding what it was and never asking questions.
School-life;
Started at the local village school age 5, it was a rubbish school and by the time i left it at age 7 and a half i could barely read & write. I did however have many friends there and enjoyed my time there.
Aged 7 and a half: Started day school at a good all-girls in my local town, it was a great school. The headmistress herself took it upon herself to teach me how to read & write, all the teachers were lovely & very good there and within a year or so i had been moved up a whole year. I had many friends and i loved that places to pieces.
Boarding school: But for whatever reasons, at age 11 during the summer holiday inbetween moving from preparatory to middle/senior school my mother had a change of heart and suddenly (& very randomly) sent me to a boarding school in a faraway county.
I never fit in at this school from the get-go. In the holiday between changing schools, i developed full-blown spots. Due to my mothers inadequacies, i started school 2 weeks late and she did not even get me a new school uniform (which was VERY different to my old schools uniform) but left me at the school with nothing more than my old school uniform to wear for 2 weeks (no casual clothes, nothing). To make matters worse, this school was posh & cosmetic and what with coming from a no-money farming background, i did not fit into this new place on any level.
So the bullying started, and i had no idea on how to counteract it.
I had previously been a pretty outgoing kid with my old school friends (although a ground-down individual at home), i was very naive and believed you just had to be nice & be yourself to make friends. Not here! The social life was vicious and popularity was ever-changing. One the bullying started it never stopped, and that was it for me for the next 5 years of my left.
And i certainly wasn't going to let anyone know that on top of everything else, i was Dysphraxic to boot.
Long story short, made some "friends" there, although in reality we were just a bunch of ostracized kids who stuck together because we had no-one else. Over the years my apparent "best friend" decided it was worth betraying me and turning everyone against me with lies in an effort to rise up the social ladder (back then, if you wanted to be popular, it was a crucial thing that you picked on someone else below you or on par with you).
Still naive, i had no idea what was going on until it was all too late. Combined with the years of relentless bullying, bad home life, betrayals & constant grinding down etc i finally snapped and lost it. Realising the betrayal i chased this girl with all my might but she escaped and i was left downtrodden and completely at rock bottom. I had just completed my GCSE's and with 3 weeks of nothingness to go, the teachers said it was better that i just go home.
My mother told me i had been expelled.
This was actually a lie (amongst other things, she is a compulsive & pathological liar), although back then i believed her (i fact it took about 7 years for her to one day randomly come clean about this particular lie), and as a consequence she gave me hell every day for this "expulsion".
You would not believe the things she did, but eventually i my depression turned into full-blown suicidal depression and i tried to commit suicide.
Thankfully my brother found me & saved me, he spent a long time talking me out of it. When he believed it was safe to leave me, he left. (< I honestly believe if he had not found me, i would not be to this day)
And it was during this absolute rock-bottom moment, sitting on the vegetable garden path in the sun, looking at the ground, that i decided to give life one last chance. I had given people many chances, but i thought to myself, surely if anything deserves another chance it's life itself? I knew i had to radically turn my life around if i was to survive. I didn't want to die, but my life had become so dire that i had seriously viewed death as being the only release to my sufferings. I was shocked at myself that i had literally (and really for real) just tried to kill myself. I thought to myself, this is rock bottom. And if i'm at rock bottom then at least i can fall any further right?
So i thought long & hard about what i wanted in life and how i was going to achieve it.
Amidst all the daily ravings & rantings of my mother, she had occasionally shouted at me about started at college. Previously i had had no intention of returning back to education (especially after my horrible experiences in my last school). But i suddenly viewed college in a different light- i wanted friends, i wanted to be liked, i wanted to be myself, i wanted after all my years of child labour & opression to have the chance to actually be independant. I suddenly viewed college as the means to achieve all this.
So i secretly embarked on repairing myself. I realized i had a hell of a lot to change. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere and my only positive social experiences that i had ever had had been between the age of 6-11. Being bullied & ostracized at the boarding school, my social skills had not developed once ounce for years (and they weren't that great to begin with). I had also become horribly withdrawn (the nail that sticks out gets hammered, and so when being bullied you learn not to say anything, do anything etc in case it attracts even more negative attention to you. Not to mention that my mother & brother were also essentially 2 big bullies, so i was withdrawn both inside & outside of home).
So i realised that if i was to wipe the slate clean and do & have everything i wanted at college etc, that if i wasn't going to ruin my one new chance to rewrite my life, i had to address these 2 issues. And it was REALLY hard trying to do these things all alone because nothing came naturally/easily to me (but then again when the alternative is failure that equals death, you'll put every last drop of energy & thought you have into anything. In a strange way, my scrape with suicide empowered rather than weakened me. When you look at death right in the eyes, with no attachments, hopes, will etc left in the world, you suddenly see everything with a new clarity.).
It helped a lot that i went off to live with a friend in Australia for 2 months (where rebuilt myself), because when i came back i was changed (and seriously stronger) person. Nobody helped me with anything, everything came from within me. I was genuinely strong.
So new strong me (and very rebellious me at that, for i had to rebel against much in my life including many people to be set free from my oppression and remain strong) started college, aged 16.
And you know what? I rocked that place !
Within 2 weeks i was a very popular person. I was making more friends than i could keep track of. I was expressing myself truly as a person too- i went full-on goth and met a lot of intelligent, down to earth people etc. I have to say i smoked a hell of a lot of the green stuff though (and drank a lot)
.
But those days were some of the best days of my life (even though most of the time i was skint & starved lol).
Everyday was a new adventure, everyday new experiences. And despite being young & taking the odd risk here & there, i had a strong sense of independence & was very philosophical (and especially accepting of other people- though i became popular, i was always the first to stand up for the underdog etc).
And then one day i met my guy. We hit it off from the word go. We fell in love very quickly, and because both he & i wanted to move out of our respective homes, we moved out together after only a few months and i started working (he was already working).
Life has been good ever since too. After an entire childhood of suffering (my father died in a tragic accident when i was very young, grew up with a mental mother, was abused by a close relative, brother beat me up repeatedly as a little kid etc) my life was finally just starting (and it was a good one at that- screw being miserable about being poor when you have good friends, a loving partner, a job, food & a roof over your head!).
The whole being skint issue bugged me a bit at the start, but i accepted my lot in life as it was better than i could have ever imagined.
And then totally randomly, at age 18 after 2 and a half years of renting i ran into some random inheritance from a relative i never knew. Looking back now it wasn't that much, but back then it felt like winning the lottery. But i was sensible with it- i invested it, and a year down the line i bought a small house with some of it.
Then many more years of investing later, i sold that place, moved to a better area and bought a bigger place (been living here for over 2 years now).
And i'm still with my guy (just celebrated our 10 year anniversary together 
!).
So where does the Dysphraxia come into all of this?
Well, as i said before, for donkeys years i never spoke to anyone about it. And TBH i didn't want to believe i had it. My mother has made up some god awful lies over the years and, honestly, for many years i just wanted to believe that this was just another lie. If it was it wouldn't be the worst one by FAR.
But on the other hand...
I know i'm not "normal". I struggle with things that other people just don't. I'm 26 years old, and;
1. I still struggle with telling left from right.
2. I'm clumsy. I regularly trip over my feet (and i don't have big feet- they're small!), knocking my feet/legs against things, tripping over things etc. Sometimes everyday this happens. My legs always have bruises etc.
3. I suffer from fatigue & poor posture.
4. I have poor balance.
5. I'm rubbish at sports involving balls/rubbish at throwing & catching things.
6. I talk too much ("waffle on"), get muddled up with words & numbers, regularly unwittingly repeat myself, even the volume/pitch of my voice changes sometimes without me intending it to.
7. I lose my place reading all the time.
8. I'm oversensitive to light & noise/ have difficulty in distinguishing sounds from background noise. Heck, i'm just gonna copy & paste Dysphraxia symptoms that apply to me lol;
9. Over- or under-sensitive to touch. Can result in dislike of being touched and/or aversion to over-loose or tight clothing - tactile defensiveness
10. Over- or under-sensitive to smell and taste, temperature and pain.
11. Lack of awareness of body position in space and spatial relationships. Can result in bumping into and tripping over things and people, dropping and spilling things
12. Little sense of time, speed, distance or weight.
13. Inadequate sense of direction.
14. Difficulty in planning and organising thought
15. Poor short-term memory.
16. Unfocused and erratic. Can be messy and cluttered
17. Poor sequencing causes problems with maths, reading and spelling and writing reports at work- applies to me.
18. Difficulty in following instructions, especially more than one at a time
19. Difficulty with concentration. Easily distracted.
20. Slow to finish a task. May daydream and wander about aimlessly.
21. Difficulty in listening to people, especially in large groups. Can be tactless, interrupt frequently. Problems with team work
22. Difficulty in picking up non-verbal signals or in judging tone or pitch of voice in themselves and or others.
23. Impulsive. Tendency to be easily frustrated, wanting immediate gratification
24. Tendency to be erratic ñ have 'good and bad days' (< SOOO true!!!)
25. Tendency to opt out of things that are too difficult.
26. Tend to get stressed, depressed and anxious easily (< this has been getting worse recently, even though my life is not stressful or sad).
27. I have a lot of sleeping problems.
28. Prone to low self-esteem, emotional outbursts, phobias, fears, obsessions, compulsions and addictive behaviour (< Yeah...this is VERY true too :/ ).
Etc...
As a little kid i had all the typical child Dysphraxia problems like taking years to learn how to tie my shoelaces (even though i can do it now i'm still not great at it lol) and taking forever to dress properly etc.
I have never known anyone else with Dysphraxia, and it has only been really recently (pretty much today) that i actually started looking things up about it.
I have been in denial about it for donkeys years.
And all these symptoms, i have always struggled with them since forever.
They aren't minor things.
But its only been extremely recently that i have started to connect all my lifelong struggles with Dysphraxia.
I really want to change my life right now.
I have a good life but i'm not doing the job i want to do, i don't have the friends i want to have. I'm not leading anywhere near as proactive life as i want to be living. I'm not even in control of myself as much as i want to be. But i have all these mental blocks and difficulties. I have to make a conscious effort in everything, and everything (even the most basic things) is hard. For many years i have wondered to myself "Am i not normal or does everything struggle/feel this way in this particular thing and just gets on with it (and that i just need to get on with it too)?" about so many things.
Now i'm beginning to realize that no, i am different and my internal struggles/mental battles aren't normal. In a weird way this is sort of relieving, as now i finally have an answer to my main question.
But i love normality. My childhood was abnormal, there were many things that happened in it & which i had to go through which the majority of children never experience in their lives. Even now my life isn't that regular. But i have always wanted a normal life. I don't relish having problems, i don't want them. I just want to find answers/solutions to my problems and lead a normal, functional life.
Normality is what i have always aspired too!
And though some things aren't ever gonna be normal in my life or history, i hope to make as much as possible that is changeable into normal & functional. I don't want to live a life of regrets, and in the past i have already lost some precious years of my life to depression etc. I have a lovely guy and i want to do my best not only by him, but by myself too.
So i'm hoping i can learn more about Dysphraxia here and hopefully find answers & solutions to my problems ^_^v .
! Some of my life story (you can totally skip it you want, its very long so if you "TLDR" i can totally understand that ) ^_^v ;I was first diagnosed with Dysphraxia around about the age of 7. I don't really remember much about it (it was a long time ago) expect that one day my mum told me that i was Dysphraxic. It was also around this time that my (2 years older) brother was diagnosed with having very strong Dyslexia.
But while my brother was given a great deal of help & attention about his Dyslexia (shortly afterwards at age 9 he was sent off to a special full time boarding school for Dyslexic boys and was doted on even more by mother etc) i was given no help whatsoever.
The condition was not even properly explained to me, and rather than help me, my mother just ridiculed me and made fun of me for it (i kid you not! She is a very disturbed woman, one big walking personality disorder, and played a horrible favouritism between me & my bro etc), making jokes at me etc (for example if it tripped over something or walked in a flat footed manner she would say "Dysphraxic! Dysphraxic! Dysphraxic!" in a high pitched parrot like voice & poked me in the side for it etc.
As a consequence, from a young age i got the impression that although i did not know much about Dysphraxia, it wasn't something you told people you add or asked questions about, rather, it was something to be hidden & ashamed of.
So i went through most of my life struggling with the symptoms of Dysphraxia, never understanding what it was and never asking questions.
School-life;
Started at the local village school age 5, it was a rubbish school and by the time i left it at age 7 and a half i could barely read & write. I did however have many friends there and enjoyed my time there.
Aged 7 and a half: Started day school at a good all-girls in my local town, it was a great school. The headmistress herself took it upon herself to teach me how to read & write, all the teachers were lovely & very good there and within a year or so i had been moved up a whole year. I had many friends and i loved that places to pieces.
Boarding school: But for whatever reasons, at age 11 during the summer holiday inbetween moving from preparatory to middle/senior school my mother had a change of heart and suddenly (& very randomly) sent me to a boarding school in a faraway county.
I never fit in at this school from the get-go. In the holiday between changing schools, i developed full-blown spots. Due to my mothers inadequacies, i started school 2 weeks late and she did not even get me a new school uniform (which was VERY different to my old schools uniform) but left me at the school with nothing more than my old school uniform to wear for 2 weeks (no casual clothes, nothing). To make matters worse, this school was posh & cosmetic and what with coming from a no-money farming background, i did not fit into this new place on any level.
So the bullying started, and i had no idea on how to counteract it.
I had previously been a pretty outgoing kid with my old school friends (although a ground-down individual at home), i was very naive and believed you just had to be nice & be yourself to make friends. Not here! The social life was vicious and popularity was ever-changing. One the bullying started it never stopped, and that was it for me for the next 5 years of my left.
And i certainly wasn't going to let anyone know that on top of everything else, i was Dysphraxic to boot.
Long story short, made some "friends" there, although in reality we were just a bunch of ostracized kids who stuck together because we had no-one else. Over the years my apparent "best friend" decided it was worth betraying me and turning everyone against me with lies in an effort to rise up the social ladder (back then, if you wanted to be popular, it was a crucial thing that you picked on someone else below you or on par with you).
Still naive, i had no idea what was going on until it was all too late. Combined with the years of relentless bullying, bad home life, betrayals & constant grinding down etc i finally snapped and lost it. Realising the betrayal i chased this girl with all my might but she escaped and i was left downtrodden and completely at rock bottom. I had just completed my GCSE's and with 3 weeks of nothingness to go, the teachers said it was better that i just go home.
My mother told me i had been expelled.
This was actually a lie (amongst other things, she is a compulsive & pathological liar), although back then i believed her (i fact it took about 7 years for her to one day randomly come clean about this particular lie), and as a consequence she gave me hell every day for this "expulsion".
You would not believe the things she did, but eventually i my depression turned into full-blown suicidal depression and i tried to commit suicide.
Thankfully my brother found me & saved me, he spent a long time talking me out of it. When he believed it was safe to leave me, he left. (< I honestly believe if he had not found me, i would not be to this day)
And it was during this absolute rock-bottom moment, sitting on the vegetable garden path in the sun, looking at the ground, that i decided to give life one last chance. I had given people many chances, but i thought to myself, surely if anything deserves another chance it's life itself? I knew i had to radically turn my life around if i was to survive. I didn't want to die, but my life had become so dire that i had seriously viewed death as being the only release to my sufferings. I was shocked at myself that i had literally (and really for real) just tried to kill myself. I thought to myself, this is rock bottom. And if i'm at rock bottom then at least i can fall any further right?
So i thought long & hard about what i wanted in life and how i was going to achieve it.
Amidst all the daily ravings & rantings of my mother, she had occasionally shouted at me about started at college. Previously i had had no intention of returning back to education (especially after my horrible experiences in my last school). But i suddenly viewed college in a different light- i wanted friends, i wanted to be liked, i wanted to be myself, i wanted after all my years of child labour & opression to have the chance to actually be independant. I suddenly viewed college as the means to achieve all this.
So i secretly embarked on repairing myself. I realized i had a hell of a lot to change. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere and my only positive social experiences that i had ever had had been between the age of 6-11. Being bullied & ostracized at the boarding school, my social skills had not developed once ounce for years (and they weren't that great to begin with). I had also become horribly withdrawn (the nail that sticks out gets hammered, and so when being bullied you learn not to say anything, do anything etc in case it attracts even more negative attention to you. Not to mention that my mother & brother were also essentially 2 big bullies, so i was withdrawn both inside & outside of home).
So i realised that if i was to wipe the slate clean and do & have everything i wanted at college etc, that if i wasn't going to ruin my one new chance to rewrite my life, i had to address these 2 issues. And it was REALLY hard trying to do these things all alone because nothing came naturally/easily to me (but then again when the alternative is failure that equals death, you'll put every last drop of energy & thought you have into anything. In a strange way, my scrape with suicide empowered rather than weakened me. When you look at death right in the eyes, with no attachments, hopes, will etc left in the world, you suddenly see everything with a new clarity.).
It helped a lot that i went off to live with a friend in Australia for 2 months (where rebuilt myself), because when i came back i was changed (and seriously stronger) person. Nobody helped me with anything, everything came from within me. I was genuinely strong.
So new strong me (and very rebellious me at that, for i had to rebel against much in my life including many people to be set free from my oppression and remain strong) started college, aged 16.
And you know what? I rocked that place
!Within 2 weeks i was a very popular person. I was making more friends than i could keep track of. I was expressing myself truly as a person too- i went full-on goth and met a lot of intelligent, down to earth people etc. I have to say i smoked a hell of a lot of the green stuff though (and drank a lot)
. But those days were some of the best days of my life (even though most of the time i was skint & starved lol).
Everyday was a new adventure, everyday new experiences. And despite being young & taking the odd risk here & there, i had a strong sense of independence & was very philosophical (and especially accepting of other people- though i became popular, i was always the first to stand up for the underdog etc).
And then one day i met my guy. We hit it off from the word go. We fell in love very quickly, and because both he & i wanted to move out of our respective homes, we moved out together after only a few months and i started working (he was already working).
Life has been good ever since too. After an entire childhood of suffering (my father died in a tragic accident when i was very young, grew up with a mental mother, was abused by a close relative, brother beat me up repeatedly as a little kid etc) my life was finally just starting (and it was a good one at that- screw being miserable about being poor when you have good friends, a loving partner, a job, food & a roof over your head!).
The whole being skint issue bugged me a bit at the start, but i accepted my lot in life as it was better than i could have ever imagined.
And then totally randomly, at age 18 after 2 and a half years of renting i ran into some random inheritance from a relative i never knew. Looking back now it wasn't that much, but back then it felt like winning the lottery. But i was sensible with it- i invested it, and a year down the line i bought a small house with some of it.
Then many more years of investing later, i sold that place, moved to a better area and bought a bigger place (been living here for over 2 years now).
And i'm still with my guy
(just celebrated our 10 year anniversary together !). So where does the Dysphraxia come into all of this?
Well, as i said before, for donkeys years i never spoke to anyone about it. And TBH i didn't want to believe i had it. My mother has made up some god awful lies over the years and, honestly, for many years i just wanted to believe that this was just another lie. If it was it wouldn't be the worst one by FAR.
But on the other hand...
I know i'm not "normal". I struggle with things that other people just don't. I'm 26 years old, and;
1. I still struggle with telling left from right.
2. I'm clumsy. I regularly trip over my feet (and i don't have big feet- they're small!), knocking my feet/legs against things, tripping over things etc. Sometimes everyday this happens. My legs always have bruises etc.
3. I suffer from fatigue & poor posture.
4. I have poor balance.
5. I'm rubbish at sports involving balls/rubbish at throwing & catching things.
6. I talk too much ("waffle on"), get muddled up with words & numbers, regularly unwittingly repeat myself, even the volume/pitch of my voice changes sometimes without me intending it to.
7. I lose my place reading all the time.
8. I'm oversensitive to light & noise/ have difficulty in distinguishing sounds from background noise. Heck, i'm just gonna copy & paste Dysphraxia symptoms that apply to me lol;
9. Over- or under-sensitive to touch. Can result in dislike of being touched and/or aversion to over-loose or tight clothing - tactile defensiveness
10. Over- or under-sensitive to smell and taste, temperature and pain.
11. Lack of awareness of body position in space and spatial relationships. Can result in bumping into and tripping over things and people, dropping and spilling things
12. Little sense of time, speed, distance or weight.
13. Inadequate sense of direction.
14. Difficulty in planning and organising thought
15. Poor short-term memory.
16. Unfocused and erratic. Can be messy and cluttered
17. Poor sequencing causes problems with maths, reading and spelling and writing reports at work- applies to me.
18. Difficulty in following instructions, especially more than one at a time
19. Difficulty with concentration. Easily distracted.
20. Slow to finish a task. May daydream and wander about aimlessly.
21. Difficulty in listening to people, especially in large groups. Can be tactless, interrupt frequently. Problems with team work
22. Difficulty in picking up non-verbal signals or in judging tone or pitch of voice in themselves and or others.
23. Impulsive. Tendency to be easily frustrated, wanting immediate gratification
24. Tendency to be erratic ñ have 'good and bad days' (< SOOO true!!!)
25. Tendency to opt out of things that are too difficult.
26. Tend to get stressed, depressed and anxious easily (< this has been getting worse recently, even though my life is not stressful or sad).
27. I have a lot of sleeping problems.
28. Prone to low self-esteem, emotional outbursts, phobias, fears, obsessions, compulsions and addictive behaviour (< Yeah...this is VERY true too :/ ).
Etc...
As a little kid i had all the typical child Dysphraxia problems like taking years to learn how to tie my shoelaces (even though i can do it now i'm still not great at it lol) and taking forever to dress properly etc.
I have never known anyone else with Dysphraxia, and it has only been really recently (pretty much today) that i actually started looking things up about it.
I have been in denial about it for donkeys years.
And all these symptoms, i have always struggled with them since forever.
They aren't minor things.
But its only been extremely recently that i have started to connect all my lifelong struggles with Dysphraxia.
I really want to change my life right now.
I have a good life but i'm not doing the job i want to do, i don't have the friends i want to have. I'm not leading anywhere near as proactive life as i want to be living. I'm not even in control of myself as much as i want to be. But i have all these mental blocks and difficulties. I have to make a conscious effort in everything, and everything (even the most basic things) is hard. For many years i have wondered to myself "Am i not normal or does everything struggle/feel this way in this particular thing and just gets on with it (and that i just need to get on with it too)?" about so many things.
Now i'm beginning to realize that no, i am different and my internal struggles/mental battles aren't normal. In a weird way this is sort of relieving, as now i finally have an answer to my main question.
But i love normality. My childhood was abnormal, there were many things that happened in it & which i had to go through which the majority of children never experience in their lives. Even now my life isn't that regular. But i have always wanted a normal life. I don't relish having problems, i don't want them. I just want to find answers/solutions to my problems and lead a normal, functional life.
Normality is what i have always aspired too!
And though some things aren't ever gonna be normal in my life or history, i hope to make as much as possible that is changeable into normal & functional. I don't want to live a life of regrets, and in the past i have already lost some precious years of my life to depression etc. I have a lovely guy and i want to do my best not only by him, but by myself too.
So i'm hoping i can learn more about Dysphraxia here and hopefully find answers & solutions to my problems ^_^v .
