It’s Dyspraxia Awareness Week and there are many people contributing the bits and pieces to help bring dyspraxia into the limelight. I was going to use the news about ‘Doctor Who’ introducing a dyspraxic character as a starting point but I felt by the time this week commenced it would have been old news. When this post rolled out, everyone would know about it anyway making my post kinda pointless. I have a post in the pipeline but it is under wraps at the moment and I’ll share it when it is ready.
In the meantime, I’ll set myself some questions to answer.
Why raise awareness for Dyspraxia at all?
Dyspraxia is often forgotten and when it isn’t forgotten it hasn’t even been heard of. The lack of knowledge and understanding is one of the major issues facing dyspraxia to date – this is slowly getting fixed by the countless people working towards that issue. I’ve personally faced too much ignorance in the past from tutors who should know better to lazy teachers who let their opinions be their final judgement.
Dyspraxia is quite frankly an ‘unbelievable’ condition. For starters, because it sounds similar to dyslexia people think you’re either mistaken or making it up. The other issue is that because the condition makes you clumsy, people automatically think that there is no excuse because they’re clumsy too and that’s just being human.
What is it like having Dyspraxia?
For a lot of us having dyspraxia is an uncomfortable experience. Not only do we have the direct issues of the dyspraxia but also the ridicule and backlash from those around us. If we had a little bit more understanding and support we would have more success in life.
Dyspraxia has an uncanny ability to make each day random ~ could be better than the day before or worst. The type of day we have is coupled with our mental health. If we’re having a bad day then that hits our self-esteem and/or we become self-conscious about it. With that attitude, we tend to try a lot harder to not get into mishaps. Which just ends up with us getting flustered and having more clumsy moments and so the vicious cycle continues.
What can I do to help?
By understanding and accepting that dyspraxia exists is the first big helpful thing to do. If everyone had that attitude then getting support would be easier. The next part in helping is to spread the awareness to others, share the information amongst your family, friends, colleagues, workplaces, and schools etc. By making dyspraxia common knowledge like its cousins, dyslexia and autism, then that’ll make things a little less complicated.
So what is dyspraxia exactly?
In this post, I have eluded to exactly what is dyspraxia because I’ve covered a large part of it in my blog already and don’t want to cover the same old ground. If you are interested in knowing what dyspraxia is then I have an awareness page which outlines the main points here:
http://www.dyspraxicfantastic.com/dyspraxia-dcd-awareness-page/
That’s about it from me, I hope this has been a little insightful into the world of dyspraxia for you. If you’re new to my blog then welcome and please feel free to follow me on the various social