Kontextmaschine

30th March 2023

Post reblogged from Baconmancer with 10,346 notes

cant-hug-every-human:
transmascanine:
shout out to people with spatial awareness issues. wishing you a “didn’t bump into any table corners or walls” day today!
Lol this is called being clumsy, I “have” it I guess, please I beseech you don’t make every single thing you’re bad at a label and incorporate it into your identity
I understand where you are coming from, and I am trying to explain politely why I disagree, but I am kind of upset right now and I might not be doing the best job of it.
(anybody reading this, please do NOT go into the inbox of the person I reblogged from)

I was diagnosed with developmental dyspraxia when I was 5 years old. The main symptoms are “poor spatial awareness” and “poor motor skills”. Some people hear this and think that this is unnecessary medicalisation of being “just clumsy.” And I certainly don’t think that the ICD-10 is some flawless document handed down on tablets from heaven, and I think in utopia that this difference could receive appropriate skills-training and accommodation without medicalisation. But in currently-existing-society, it makes sense to classify me as a disabled person. I will explain why.
When I was kid, I had multiple years of occupational therapy and physical therapy. These took multiple hours a week, for several years, and helped me learn stuff that other kids of the same age learned easily. One example: I can now use a standard knife and fork, but I couldn’t until I was 10, and the way I ate was very visibly messy. As a child I had to use adaptive cutlery to eat my meals in school. I had to have special grips on my pens and pencils because it took multiple years to learn to hold them in the normal way. (Also, school sports was particularly nightmarish for me, but that’s an extremely common experience, including among many people who are not reasonably classed as disabled, so idk how relevant that is.)
These things made me a social outcast. There was a period where everyone in my school had a running joke of “the Esther disease”. Other kids would make a huge deal out of refusing to touch me, or sit on chairs where I had previously sat. People would run up to me, poke me with a ruler, then touch one of their friends with a ruler and say “you’re infected now.” This was a pretty scarring experience and is probably one of many reasons why I developed extremely severe self-esteem problems.
Because I was lucky enough to get years of physical therapy at an early age, the gap between me and the average person is narrower than it was when I was a child. (My fine motor skills improved more than my gross motor skills, which is probably more convenient than the other way around.) Because I grew up in the UK, I received this treatment without my family going into massive amounts of debt. If I had grown up in the US, I would either have gone without or bankrupted my family. If I had grown up in many of the poorest regions of the global south, where most people cannot afford physical therapy, and where almost all available work is physical labor that requires good motor skills, I would be utterly utterly fucked. Presumably, there are millions of people like me in poor countries, who are utterly utterly fucked in this way.
Although I can pass as “normal” in many situations as an adult, my dyspraxia is the reason I have been told I am (among other things) medically unfit to drive. This is somewhat disabling, even in a city with good transit. If I didn’t have a rich husband, it would be extremely disabling, but fortunately I married a tech bro and can afford to live in one of the relatively few cities in the US where getting around without a car is feasible (and can afford to order uber or lyft when i have to go somewhere inaccessible by public transit.) There are vast swathes of the country where my inability to drive would make me literally unemployable and mean that I had basically no social life. Many people like me are living like this now, because they have no access to public transportation and can’t afford to move somewhere with good public transportation.
I have also had the cops called on me, twice, for walking with an odd gait in public. (This was when I was still in the UK, where calling the cops is less of a hostile act because they are not usually armed, but it was still scary.) On both occasions, someone incorrectly assumed based on the way I walk that I have an intellectual disability, and then further assumed that I shouldn’t be allowed to walk around on my own, so called the cops to check on me for my own safety. (Obviously, if I actually had an intellectual disability, this would still absolutely not be okay.) Since these that happened, I have made a conscious effort to walk more normally in public but it is hard.
I know people who are more severely dyspraxic than me who have need more support than I do. For example, some of them have trouble finding appropriate housing because they cannot safely go up and down stairs.
And yes, I also bump into things a bunch and it’s annoying and I pretty much always have bruises somewhere, although frankly I do not care as much about this. But I make jokes about it when I talk with other dyspraxic people, because it’s a bonding thing.
Yeah, the post says “spatial awareness issues” and not “developmental dyspraxia”. This is because there are a lot of conditions that have spatial awareness issues as a symptom, and people with those conditions also have legitimately disabling experiences (like needing to use adaptive cutlery, or not being able to drive.) There are a lot of us. And it helps me to be reminded that I am not alone.
I think some of the people reblogging this are probably making being slightly-less-co-ordinated than average into “an identity thing.” That’s mildly annoying, and probably not good for them, but I honestly don’t care. Because a lot of the people reblogging this are people like me.
I didn’t ask to be labelled contaminated by my peers as a child. I didn’t ask to have random people call the police because the way I walk bothers them. I didn’t ask for the whole of urban planning to be structured around the idea that people who can’t drive either don’t or shouldn’t exist. I want to just live my life. I want to be reminded that people like me do not have to be ashamed.
I don’t talk about dyspraxia as much as I used to, because there was a period in my life where it kind of did become my “whole identity”. This was a time in my life where I was severely depressed and very isolated for a lot of reasons, some of which were related to dyspraxia and some of which weren’t. At that time, online dyspraxia communities were the only place where I was not horrifically lonely, so I kind of “leaned in” to neurodiversity pride so hard I forgot about the rest of myself, like there were no other aspects to me. If that phase had continued for my entire life, it would have been damaging and limiting for me. But I think I needed to go through that period, for a little bit of time, because otherwise I would 1. never have fully accepted myself as a dyspraxic person 2. been completely alone during the worst depression of my life, and possibly have literally ended up killing myself. So when I see people online leaning so hard into neurodiversity pride stuff so hard that they forget the rest of who they are, I don’t fight them. I gently remind them that there are other things in the world, but I understand why it’s necessary, as a temporary phase. And I don’t know someone else’s life well enough to know how long they need that temporary phase to be. And it’s certainly long enough to spend literally three seconds reblogging a joke about bumping into stuff.
(Obviously, there are many groups of disabled people who face far bigger barriers in society. My challenges getting around as someone who can’t drive (but can walk and see just fine) are nothing compared to challenges faced by wheelchair users, or people who walk with crutches, or blind people, or many other groups. Being occasionally harassed because someone wrongly assumes I’m intellectually disabled is a much easier life than moving through society if you’re actually intellectually disabled. I just feel like it is important for me to acknowledge that in this post.)

I will say that when Covid got into my brain and screwed up my neuromuscular control and spatial awareness for a while eventually it got so bad it was obviously a disability thing (those “are you always doing this” ::absurd spill:: product commercials are for people with neuromuscular disabilities, which is why they air when employed people are at work. I was constantly doing that). But on the way there as it got worst, I just felt clumsy. I would reach out to put things places and on releasing them realize I had just dropped them in midair all the time. That stuff really was a spectrum.