...But never recognized.

I am Dyspraxic, therefore I reluctantly choose to thrive.

Quoting from the dissertation: “A Coordinated Effort: (Re)Imagining a World for Individuals With Dyspraxia/DCD” By Stacie Lynn Warner, specifically one of her subjects, they go by Eliza (in the dissertation)

“Misdiagnosis

Always unaware,

Maybe ADHD,

Perhaps Autistic,

But never recognized.

Never fit in,

Neither works,

Feel not NT,

Neither typically ND,

Just wish someone said

You are dyspraxic

Long and proud

Many years ago.”

Although I was diagnosed at 6, I still have felt this way for most of my life. I had a name for my bad handwriting, and my socially awkward childhood, my clumsy gait, my walking into walls… But when I was a kid, dyspraxia was a thing you grew out of.

My friends started planning their college careers and what they would be when they got their degrees. Doctors, teachers, therapists, engineers, lawyers… You get the picture.

They were making these plans, and here I was not even sure I wanted to go to college at all. I mean, after all, was there any point? I didn’t have any earthly clue of what I wanted to do with my life, and my parents were constantly fighting and pulling me into their arguments, making me feel as though they could not survive without my constant mediating presence. Why would I agree to go through more schooling if I was just gonna get called home every couple of weeks to mediate yet another discussion between two people who had grown completely incompatible?

The truth of it was I couldn’t fathom the idea of leaving home. I couldn’t visualize a future; I knew I probably wasn’t alone in that, but the more I spoke to my friends with stars in their eyes and big ideas in their hearts, I realized I seemed to be the only one lacking in a plan.

Junior year it somehow got even worse and even louder. People would ask me what my plan was. WHAT FUCKING PLAN? Also, I’m OVER this dyspraxia thing. Why can’t I walk through the hallways at school without walking into people next to me or the wall?

They put me in all the college-bound classes, research paper writing, chemistry, and psychology, and I was doing ok; I wasn’t falling behind or anything, but I certainly didn’t have any friends to speak to.

The second semester of my senior year came swinging at my head faster than I expected. My parents were not speaking through most of it, or speaking through me to each other. It was a lot for anyone to handle, but adding to that, I still didn’t have a plan.

I thought of escaping, moving away, never returning, but I knew that the odds were not in my favor. I decided that yes, I would try to go away to school. Just somewhere small, but not remotely nearby. My Dad took me to a college night at a local mall. I looked over all the colleges, knowing that the only logical thing to do was to just… pick one.

I always loved spending time in the UP on Lake Superior’s shores in the summer, so when I saw Lake State and that they had a robust English program, I figured I had found where I needed to be. The assemblage of a plan started to come together.

I was social justice-minded, even then. I decided I wanted to go to school to become a political journalist. Low on math acumen, high on adventure, very high on research, which I had learned to love.

When I moved away, I almost immediately fell in with a group of the right KIND of people. But, the ones I kept closer were definitely the wrong kind of people. My life got sidetracked heavily from my time at LSSU. I only stayed a semester and spent most of it in my then-boyfriend’s dorm room. I was a weird kid; my siblings weren’t quite as weird; they always had dates. I had my solitude. It was nice to be a part of the in crowd for a minute.

But my then boyfriend had some mental illnesses that did not play particularly well with the people-pleasing, and being occasionally gaslit at home as family tradition, and the inability to really understand what was going on around me.

Through all of this, I just assumed there was something wrong with me. How did I not see this person would be abusive? He had the red flags out on the drying line when I walked up. How did I not know I was pregnant when I was throwing up every couple of days after meals? Why did I let that man hit me? Why did I let him attempt to strangle me, and why did I let him keep me in the house when I needed to walk away to calm down?

I felt shame, I felt stupid, I felt used. There wasn’t a fairy godmother there to say, “My dear, you sometimes do not read a situation entirely correctly. That’s by design; you have Dyspraxia and years’ worth of training that tell you that no one wants to answer your questions. You’re smart, and you can make some really astute assumptions, but that doesn’t replace actual information.”

By my mid-20s, I had met and fallen in love with someone else- an individual with Autism. Our lives were idyllic; we never planned anything, we just lived our lives flitting from vibe to vibe. Our parents crinkled their faces at first; neither set of parents liked the other person in the relationship. As they saw how we worked together in solving the problems of adulthood, however, they began to understand how this individual and I ended up together.

We built a life, we had 3 kids together, then the unthinkable happened. Without going into details, that man is now in jail and will be for the foreseeable future.

Our beautiful children were taken in by my now ex-in-laws, who decided that, since I testified against my ex, I was evil and I made everything up. They… Didn’t let it slip before custody arrangements were made. I was cut out of my kid’s lives.

I have a child I haven’t seen since they were 3. I do not know if they even know my name.

Cited in the paperwork, “She just needs some extra eyes to make sure that her children do not come into harm’s way.”

Because I was honest about my conditions with the therapist performing the psych eval. I said I had Dyspraxia, and that it was related in some way to Autism (this is before I knew the term Neurodiversity). This meant that I didn’t read social situations correctly all of the time. The state grasped onto this detail as though it were a new set of Dead Sea Scrolls they had found. They based their entire case on how I couldn’t read social situations.

I don’t know if you know what that does to a person, or if I can fully explain what that does to a “normal” person. I can say what it did to me.

It made my question my very existence, let alone everything I was doing in it. I couldn’t trust my read on any person anymore; everyone had to be treated as a dangerous stranger who meant me harm. I kicked several “friends” to the curb at this point. It was a point where I could choose to be buried or choose to thrive.

I’m a Dyspraxic, therefore I reluctantly choose to thrive. Slowly. Methodically, and with a paper trail if possible.

Little-known fact: because Dyspraxia makes most manual tasks much harder and learning new skills even more difficult, most of us have had to learn resiliency as a coping mechanism. If you add in my genetic predisposition to Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, where every social slight feels like an actual injury… it was not a fun time.

I knew I was different at this point. I didn’t understand how or why.

In 2019, I lost a job I loved. From there, I moved to another contract role while I figured out what to do to pay the bills now.

In July of 2019, I opened “Tech Witch Detroit”, a mobile IT service. I would come to people’s houses, help them set up their IoT (This means Internet of Things, common shorthand for Google/Alexa), fix computer hardware and software issues, and charge a humane rate while doing so.

My rate was 20 an hour. I only charged for the times that I touched the machine. This means for backups that would take hours to days, I would charge maybe 20 minutes. This was great for my customers, but it was terrible for me.

Soon after that, there was this little thing that happened called Covid-19. My phone went silent and stayed that way, and I started watching TikToks as a means to pass the time. Once I found myself on the Neurodivergent side, I realized that the “Autism/Autism adjacent” diagnosis was likely true; this was likely why I was having trouble at the past 2/3 jobs, and now consulting work was coming up dry, too.

I fell into a deep depression. I couldn’t fix what was wrong with me, I barely even knew WHAT was wrong!

One of these Neurodivergent TikToks came across my feed that mentioned Dyspraxia by name, and the pieces finally started to fit. I got smart about it and applied those nasty research skills into my own conditions. About 5 years ago now, I started this blog about 2 years back. I have been able to find some things to help with my conditions.

I am still learning and growing. I will continue to do so, reluctantly and with a deep sense of gratitude and a level of persistence previously thought impossible.