#dyspraxia – The Misspraxic Blog

National Poetry Day – Choices

Earlier this week it was National Poetry Day, with the theme for 2021 being ‘Choices’. It felt like a very fitting theme, given all the changes and uncertainty we are having to adjust to. Admittedly, I am two days late (would it really be Misspraxic if I weren’t?!)… I still wanted to mark this day by sharing a few of my poems.

I wrote the first poem this week, on the theme of ‘Choices’ – my poem is about centering yourself as a priority when making difficult choices, which is not always easy to do. I wrote the following poems at various points during my first year in teaching, to try and express the experience of teaching and learning through the pandemic – I hope they can resonate with some of you in some way!

Next week is Dyspraxia Awareness Week – the theme is ‘Primary and Secondary Education’, so I will aim to post about this and share another set of poems about dyspraxia then. In the meantime, have a look at the Foundation’s website for resources and information about how you can get involved in Awareness Week.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments, and do check out other poems and brilliant resources from the National Poetry Day website here.

Until next time, take care everyone.

– Misspraxic

1. the uninvited visitor

she didn’t choose the uninvited visitor

who ‘forgot’ to knock every time

and pushed into the line without a pass

she didn’t choose to press the pause button

when in full flow, targeted by the visitor

who jammed the system into overdrive

and no, she didn’t choose to be chronically

dysfunctional, beating a skip and

skipping a beat, her paper heart in shreds

what was that you just said?

no, she didn’t choose for her wires to fizz and flare,

numbed into discomfort. she didn’t choose to count

the dead ends at this crossroads,

drained, there was now no space left but to

pause and listen to the currents

that kept the machine whizzing on and resist its pull

and as she made the decision to ‘re-start’,

she could see a blank canvas sky

graced with stars of connection,

where she could still choose to paint

the warmest smile and still hug the empty corners with her hope.

creased all over, she could still choose to hold on

despite the visitor’s prodding and pricking, she knew

the interference would grow duller and defeated as time went on,

as she could now see it clearly: she must choose herself everyday

2. Freedom Day?

Today’s date is July 19^th 2021 and today we are learning about ‘question forms’

and questions form on the page, as forming questions

becomes our Learning Objective that’s etched

onto my pages too. we run in parallel, a mirror lesson from me to you to me again,

from pixellated Chrome lessons in my living room and back

to the pandemic classroom where you are confined

to a jagged danger line, disjointed and perhaps

a warning sign that this safe box got crossed just too many times,

as we were pushed to ‘think outside the box’ in our teaching,

a word used loosely now, ‘teaching’ from my living room

on ‘Freedom Day’, pestering students to pop their gum in the bin

and just listen to the sounds of Miss, “you’re laggin”

and muted tones and shuffled seats,

a futile command to “listen” – but who would?

to a blur of a leader projected onto my future whiteboard

that wouldn’t break down- will it show us what to expect for 2021?

3. Climbing the walls in 2020

in twenty-twenty we were held

only by the silver birches, the beeches,

not those beaches, but in Epping.

we simply missed being sun-kissed

and hugged by the arms that once knew

old grins, gone in a beat, Missing-In-Action

in twenty-twenty-one our vase is still missing

the plot, its cracks let out all the

water, half empty

energies drained on pointless floral yoga,

goodbye clematis, alstromeria, gardenias-

your petals bloomed only last season

and you now pose a risk to our health,

climbing up the trellis in a resistant gang

against the locked-down iron bars of prison cell gardens.

now it’s only us who are climbing

the walls, desperate to grab a hug stuck in time,

stuck in twenty-nineteen.

4. Why?

Even Better If

the retired lines of Chronic Fatigue

scrawled by dud pens

didn’t make it onto the whiteboard,

now grey board- bored like you.

Even Better If

the wavy panic lines didn’t wash out my cheeks

and If the torn-down posters

somehow weren’t on display today,

If they just hid away in the bin.

Even Better If my mask did a Better job

of masking creases on waterlogged sheets

of paper scattered between Year 7 and 10

and if the creases on a bed unmade at 6,

weren’t unseen all day.

Even Better If we could go without

the background groans that yawn around the room

and fidget with fatigued,

unanswerable whys-

“miss, why?”

[For those reading who aren’t familiar with the ‘What Went Well’/’Even Better If’ feedback style that inspired the above poem, Why?, ‘EBI’ this is a common example of ‘Assessment for Learning’ in UK schools and suggesting how students can improve their work.]

A puppet in search of answers and pulled by the strings of Long Covid

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CW: Long Covid, anxiety, medical gaslighting

When I say I will write in a few days, I usually mean a few months. Or several. I had the best intentions for new routines in 2021, hoping to blog every month. It started off well in my first term as a Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT), when I could depend much more on my energy levels. I should know better than to promise you updates, though; my first year of teaching forced me to work on being more realistic with my expectations, both of myself and others. I frequently put off tasks for weeks and months, especially when I am rundown or under pressure. A seemingly simple task like washing up yesterday’s breakfast bowl gets left for longer than is sanitary. And you can add to that list: paying council tax in time to avoid incurring a summons, putting out the bins before collection or even pressing ‘Send‘ on a simple message draft to a friend. I am ashamed to say I put it all off and no amount of to-do lists or post-its seems to work, as I seem unable to prioritise anything other than my job.

Previously, I had always turned to Google to guide me through the challenges in my life. Google was like a non-judgemental friend, with its comforting guarantee of answers just a click away and always on hand to help me navigate overwhelming new cities abroad, instruct me on how long to roast potatoes for, and talk me through how to change batteries in a smoke detector. Google was a comfort, at least, until I tested positive with Covid-19 in December 2020, on the last day of the school term – just when I thought I had made it through with less drama than some of my unfortunate colleagues. When it comes to the matter of catching a new infectious disease at work, though, there is only so much that Google can really help with. The answers do not exist for anyone – Covid-19 has defied Google and medical science, and disturbingly, its seemingly never-ending supply of symptoms has defied me and my sense of self. I know myself pretty well, I thought, I am mentally strong and consistent. But after nine months of learning what my physical limits are, I am still finding my way on this journey with ‘Long Covid’.

*A puppet in search of answers and pulled by the strings of Long Covid* – ink and watercolour

What is ‘Long Covid’?

The broad term refers to long-lasting symptoms that continue to develop more than 12 weeks post-infection. Over 500 symptoms have been recorded and can include – but are not limited to – fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, muscle aches, gastro-intestinal issues, and neurological symptoms such as headaches, brain fog and dizziness. The list goes on and the symptoms can change over time. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), approximately 114,000 of the million people living with Long Covid in the UK work in education (2021). In the context of low vaccine take-up among young people aged 18-34 and amid increasing research into the long-term effects, I hope that sharing my experience can raise awareness and provide comfort to others struggling.

When you find yourself sitting on the floor to clean, or allowing deliveries of shopping bags to congregate at the bottom of the stairs for days, you realise you are well outside of “normality”. You have a problem, and accepting that problem can be difficult. I only realised I hadn’t washed up for three weeks when I had no clean cutlery left – I had completely let myself go; I had lost control and my usual dyspraxic coping mechanisms were just not working. Friends noticed the difference too and told me that I seemed very out of breath on short walks when we met up. One said they didn’t think it was right that I was working full-time in this condition.

Beyond a collection of irritating physical symptoms, the experience has been unnerving due to its unpredictability; it is anxiety-inducing to wake up each day and not know quite how I will feel or how a certain activity will trigger a symptom in the future. My energy levels still seem to fluctuate each day, so while teaching full-time, I find the symptoms distracting and challenging to manage without regular rest breaks. When faced with low-level disruptive behaviour, the pressing sensation in my chest intensifies the lack of physical control, at just the time when I am in most need of reliable energy levels to exert my presence in the classroom and meet the Teaching Standards. There is certainly an uncomfortable tension involved in prioritising what feels good for my body, over what feels right for my students’ education, and vice-versa.

And what about Dyspraxia?

How Long Covid might interact with pre-existing conditions like Dyspraxia has not yet received much attention by medical professionals, though through support groups I understand that other dyspraxics also notice that their memory and processing has worsened since Long Covid. Whether or not dyspraxia is a “neurological disorder” has been subject to much discussion. Forgetting my best friend’s birthday, for example, was a catalyst for me realising that I was not functioning at “normal” capacity, as I had never forgotten something so important before. So was this ‘brain fog’ – a reportedly common Long Covid symptom, affecting cognitive function and memory and most likely caused by inflammation to the functional nervous system – or just dyspraxia, the coordination disorder I have lived with for years and for which I have found my own coping mechanisms? To what extent is dyspraxia a permanent part of my ‘personality’, or as Occupational Health described it, something I am ‘suffering’ from, like symptoms of a disease?

It can be hard to explain the impact, though mild, on my daily life. Narratives tend to dominate that such symptoms might be ‘just stress’, when someone looks ordinary on the outside. After all, I am certainly not ‘ill’ in the sense of having a cold or the flu. But I am in a different body, a shell of the person I once was. I can no longer exercise properly without chest tightness, pain, and shortness of breath. Intermittent tremors, headaches, earaches, tingling, crawling, itching, and electric shock pains that pulsate through my body make me question my sanity on a daily basis. How can a new part of my body be zapping; where is the logic in this twitching when I grasp my hair straighteners? Muscle weakness when I struggle to open a jar? In my head and hands deciding to go numb as I try to fall asleep to switch off my body and fall asleep? Why is it that my brain is still wide-awake and now fizzing, like the contents of a bottle of coke left out in the sun? I have felt like a puppet whose strings are tugged at and pulled in all directions, whilst I am determined to throw myself onto the stage and pretend that I can do this and ‘teach as normal’, desperately wanting to be ‘fit for work’.

But this is my stage, I repeat as a mantra borrowed from a close friend whose grounding words helped me get through my first year in teaching. I have tried to ignore the symptoms, meditate through them, exercise despite them, and continue as ‘normal’ (whatever that means) – but however I seem on the outside to my students or colleagues, it is a different story on the inside. Mild as the symptoms are classed as, they are real and they still interfere with my life, worsening when I over-do it. I have to be much more mindful of my ‘spoons’ and how I choose to spend them (click here to read more about Christine Miserandino’s helpful Spoon Theory analogy to explain chronic illness). It took four months of blood tests, ECGs (heart tests) and chest scans coming back as normal before I could be diagnosed by exclusion and referred to a Long Covid clinic, and nine months before I was seen by the clinic. When seen by the clinic, it was disappointing to not be offered any sort of ‘quick fix’ for the discomfort and fatigue, yet I was also grateful to learn that Covid has caused a dysfunctional breathing pattern, known as a ‘breathing pattern disorder’, which could be exacerbating my symptoms. This is apparently common in ‘Long Haulers’ and I learned that I must now retrain my breathing pattern and reduce how much I do, in order to support my recovery from symptoms.

Throughout the past months, though, I have felt a major gratitude for my baseline health. I was never hospitalised, never left bed- or house-bound. I am fortunate to be able to walk and manage to work in a job I love. I can go about my daily life still – even if ‘functioning’ certainly means something different to what it meant in November 2020. These are things that huge numbers of people with Long Covid are not able to do. In its own way, this gratitude has been healing for me, much like painting and writing as an outlet for untangling my body’s warped state. Ultimately, my own Long Covid experience is just that – and can only be that – just one experience. It has heightened my awareness of the experiences of thousands of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) sufferers, whose voices have been gaslit and silenced for decades. The struggles of chronic illness are multiplied when they intersect with race and gender inequalities, where people living under greater oppression struggle for their voices to be heard. I share links to some other voices and advocates below, so please do have a read.

In light of how frequently women and also people in the neurodiverse community are subjected to medical gaslighting, I also feel fortunate to have had a patient and understanding doctor who has listened to my concerns and made me feel heard each time I phoned her about a mysterious new symptom. Even when she didn’t know the answers to my disgruntled whys and hows, she took steps to refer me for further testing and to the Long Covid clinic. The professionals at the clinic were incredibly reassuring as they had heard my symptoms so many times before. “You will recover from this”, they promised me, “it is just going to take time”.

Long Covid Kids

Of course, Long Covid does not only affect adults. As many as one in seven children (14%) who test positive with Covid still have symptoms 15 weeks later (UCL, 2021). Developing Long Covid as a teacher has made me more aware of the long-lasting symptoms in the children I teach. It is concerning that increasing numbers of young people who contract the virus are presenting with an array of long-lasting symptoms after weeks and months post-infection. One of my students came to see me at the end of a lesson back in May: “Miss, my chest feels tight”, he said. “I feel a pressure on my chest and my arms are also tingling. I’ve had blood tests and I’m waiting for the results…” And another student the following week: “Miss, I have virus-induced chest pain, I need to take some time out…” These are just the students who are able to or choose to articulate their symptoms aloud. If my brave students can talk about their experiences then I think I can, and should, too. After all, they are what push me to get up in the morning and drag up my reluctant body into school everyday, so it matters to try and make them feel less alone in their experiences.

Finally, please feel free to reach out to me if you are affected with lingering post-Covid symptoms and would like to share your story with me. Your experiences are real and valid, and I promise you are not alone. Be kind to you.

This time, I will avoid the rookie error of promising to write again in a few days… But I hope to write again soon.

Take care everyone,

Misspraxic

Links to further reading

Support and information:

Articles:

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Petitions you can sign:

Please let me know of any others and I will add to my list.

A Misspraxic Christmas update

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Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since my last update…! It is an understatement to tell you that this term has been a challenging one for schools, students, their parents and staff. As you will have already gathered, students and at times whole year groups have been instructed to self-isolate at home, with some students missing more months of their education and losing the structure that being in school provides. I now relate better to how it might have felt/feel for my students to be trapped within the same four walls, or to carry a confusing label with a stigma attached, or to be out of sync socially with their friends and family, especially at an important time of the year. Dyspraxia and other hidden learning differences can certainly exacerbate the anxieties associated with COVID-19, as there is a tendency to overthink situations, process them differently to others, and feel the emotions of overwhelm more intensely than neurotypicals might do.

As ever, poetry and the arts provide a helpful way for many of us dyspraxics to process this overwhelm, ground ourselves, and make sense of challenges, hopes, fears, triumphs, and our favourite word of the year, “unprecedented situations”! I know this is the case for my students, too, whose poems and courage to share them continue to energise me and strengthen my sense of purpose as a new teacher. The following poem might not be the most uplifting one I have written in 2020(!), however I am sharing it in the hope that it might be relatable for some of you, whether you are dyspraxic or not:

It is but it isn’t.
 
If it isn’t the label of disordered fine motor control,
then it’s the loss of control in a train engine
planned to stop at the station three days ago,
back before Saturn collided with Jupiter and gave me a new label.
 
If it isn’t a hot turkey dinner made for six, 
then it’s an empty plate and one absent voice
with only several paranoid ones lingering 
in the background of a laggy Zoom call.
 
If it isn’t Tiers like on last summer’s fancy wedding cake,
then it’s only a second-rate ready meal eaten alone 
and its shredded paper wrappings tossed to the bin,
right where Christmas is now, rotting away
 
in the company of crushed-up carrots that Rudolf missed, 
and chicken past its sell-by date. (Let’s not forget 
my own saliva stuck to tears that fester 
in a camouflage trap that convinces even wild animals of its safety.)
 
If it isn’t squeaky-clean laminate flooring and polished windows,
then it’s the insanity of the ones who sanitised obsessively,
who were negative about being on the positive list, 
all in a split second. 
 
You didn't break me like you broke all the others,
shattering their windows, and like you broke Christmas.
You spared me like you spared the turkey I won’t be eating,
and if it isn't Christmas, then it's a miracle that I am sparing others.

“Next time you feel alone, remember that the season of isolation is when the caterpillar grows its wings.” – Mandy Hale

I wish you all a safe holiday period, whether you celebrate Christmas or otherwise. If you are spending the holiday alone this year, then I hope that you can find little joys and lightness among the darkness. All dyspraxics carry inner strength necessary to overcome struggle, even if it doesn’t seem like it – I hope you can recognise yours and learn something from it.

I will write again in a few days with a more detailed review of my first term as a dyspraxic teacher, including some reflections and advice for managing distance teaching and Google Classroom as a dyspraxic teacher, and managing distance learning as a dyspraxic student (along with some hopefully amusing anecdotes as always!).

Until then, do take care everybody,

– Misspraxic

Long, dark November: Held back but holding up

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During teacher training, I was warned all about the challenges of getting through November as a new teacher. This phenomena was referred to as something along the lines of “long, cold, dark November”, when October half-term is a distant memory and the Christmas holidays are too far away to count down to just yet. And here I am – this is no longer a figure of speech! The “cold” part is definitely exasperated by the current requirement to push all classroom windows wide open…

It feels like a small milestone to have already made it past October half term, though, as living a daily contradiction with the label of “lockdown” leaves education settings stretched and squeezed to the limit. I tried to reflect this absurdity in this week’s poem, and hope that it might be relatable for some, whether you identify with dyspraxic traits or otherwise.

Take care everyone,

-misspraxic

Held means Hero

they make a bee line
for the C line tube
where we are all squeezed in:
them with their juice cartons from concentrate
and me with my brain cells concentrated
on just getting through the day,
on getting through to them
in an hourglass squeezed full of sardines
stuck against the frames
wedged open and our few screws
have come loose again
as they shiver the words:

"Miss, do we have to keep them open?"

but coats and mouths are zipped to close
down mentions of the C-word,
for this tube is held
by bleak Outlook pings
and crippling reminders 
that 'Held' means hero in German-
  Held back with 'can't's streaming down my cheeks,
  Held up through the missed minutes 
and unsaid pep talks on weary late nights
Holding us up through the missing links
that test us in tubes
squeezing to burst.

Creativity in the corridors of coping

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I am the teacher tired of paceman-style manoeuvres that create chaos in the corridors of not coping

Creativity tends to be a major strength in dyspraxic adults and young people alike, as we can think “outside the box” in highly valuable ways. These ways might include, but are in no way limited to, creativity in art, music, and our use of language. Creative writing can be a cathartic practice for all of us, particularly in testing times, and I know that this is certainly the case for other dyspraxics too. When you are pushed to your limits, your struggle can fuel a creative energy that enables others to feel and connect with your experience. My students sharing their own powerful poems on handouts in the staffroom this week has motivated me to do the same.

This first poem is entitled “Corridors of coping”, and expresses some of the logistical challenges involved in starting as a teacher this September.

Corridors of coping

armed with dog-eared downside-up seating plans

scrawled with hieroglyphs that hold your gaze –

today’s performance is masked by a face drenched

in sanitised regrets. i only tried to

sanitise my mind, yet my mind is a magnet

for lost words stuck down the back of yesterday’s trimmer.

i misread my timetable and arrived five minutes late,

asking you to fill in today’s missing pages,

not to fill the room with your fits of giggles.

but i can decipher the codes clues to your

barrier to learning familiar to my own barrier to teaching

for i am the teacher who catches you

dropping to the floor without a back-up plan

like a pile of clumsy papers lost along the

one-way maze at rush hour on a weekday.

i am the teacher tired of pacman-style manoeuvers

that create chaos in the corridors of not coping.

i aim to be the teacher who builds a bridge past the haze,

that unexpected rare breed of teacher, like the

novelty of a poem unfinished

As always, feel free to get in touch with your thoughts or any questions via the website and do take care everyone,

– misspraxic