Patient readers will recall that when I was a little kid, nobody would take the time to actually teach me to do things.

Nobody had the time or the patience to do it. ^[1] And I was far too timid and shy to demand someone teach me.

That didn’t keep them from making me feel bad for not being able to do the things they had expressly forbid me to do or even try, of course.

The message was clear : I was a useless person who couldn’t do anything right and that meant I would forever be a burden on others.

And I still feel that way today, 40+ years later. That shit got programmed into me deep. I still feel like there is no point in my trying to do things for myself because I will inevitably fuck it up, make things far far worse, and end up wishing I had never tried.

But there’s another factor in the equation. It’s called motor dyslexia.

Or at least it was. Now it’s called motor dysgraphia.

I am glad, because motor dyslexia was a terrible term for it. It did get the basic idea (like dyslexia, but for motor skills) across, but still, ick.

I now believe that I have had a learning disability this whole time. It makes it very hard for me to learn physical skills. I handle language, logic, memory, and so on quite well, but when it comes to doing things with my hands, I am a dunce.

I had great difficulty in learning cursive writing. I could not learn to do arts and crafts at all. Gym was a nightmare.

And it all comes back to a lack of fine motor control that borders on a disability.

For as long as I can remember, when I look at things, I do not see a clear fixed image. Instead, it’s like someone is constantly making fine adjustments to the focus. In order to compensate for this. I look at things from more than one angle by tilting my head slightly, and looking more out of one eye, then the other.

This makes it nearly impossible for me to make my hands do what the mind wants them to do. The eye guides the hand and the eye does not work right.

And I have tried many times to explain this to teachers, doctors, optometrists, and siblings, but I have never been able to get the idea across at all.

But it’s always been there, forcing me to see my world in little snapshots and glimpses, and making it very hard to cope with the world because of how hard things are for me to do and how helpless and vulnerable that makes me feel.

The one big exception is text. Words. I can read words and understand them despite what is wrong with my brain/eyes. I can write it too.

Words are my friend.

Absolutely anything, even seemingly trivial things, that require fine motor control are the enemy and to be avoided at all costs.

And that is extremely limiting.

Makes me wonder if it is treatable in an adult. There might be some brilliant therapy that teaches people to overcome the bad info from their eyes.Maybe even correct it.

Or maybe there is some kind of prosthetic that would help. Or barring that, some other form of disability assistance.

Because this shit has really fucked wth my life.

Would be nice if I could make it stop.

More after the break.

---

More about my learning disability

Face it, that’s what it is. If fine motor skills were intelligence, I would be considered retarded. I’d score way below my age/grade level.

It’s like a milder form of savantism, or savant syndrome as it is currently known. In savantism, you have someone who is severely mentally impaired but is hyper-talented in one particular limited field.

Well I am not severally mentally impaired. I’m not Rain Man. Nor do I have one limited area in which I am hyper-talented.

Instead, I am mentally impaired in limited ways involving fine motor skills, and very good in that broad category of ability we call “intelligence”.

I’m the kid who got straight As in class but flunked recess and lunch.

And the thing is, my particular learning disability was not considered a big deal. Who cares if the eight year old kid who talks like a kid can catch a ball or write legibly?

He can write well enough to pass all our tests with flying colors and rainbow sprinkles, and that’s all the system really cares about.

But to the system’s credit, they did try to help. There was this very nice Jamaican lady who worked with me to try to get me to write better and to be able to catch a ball and a number of other developmental tasks.

But it didn’t work because I was just plain impossible. I didn’t want to do these exercises, and so I passively resisted. I dragged my heels, I got distracted, I only half-listened to her, and otherwise made a pain of myself, and she could not handle it.

I wore her down. Eventually she broke down in tears of frustration at how impossible it was to teach a kid like me. One who would simply refused to do things he didn’t want to do. One for whom adult authority meant nothing. One who could think rings around most adults and often did so without even trying.

I feel bad about all that now, even though I was just a kid at the time. It’s especially bad because I really liked her.

But somehow, liking her and doing what she told me to do never connected. I suppose my other learning disorder, namely social retardation, was to blame there.

Back then, when I was eight or nine years old, it would never have occurred to me to view the thing as someone trying to help me overcome something major and that I wanted to overcome that something too, so I really should cooperate.

To me at the time, it was just someone trying to get me to do things I found painful and difficult and confusing, so I resisted.

And by that, I meant I was incredibly difficult to deal with. More difficult than any child she had ever dealt with, and I hope, more difficult than any child she dealt with after.

And I don’t even remember her name. God damn it.

Sorry, Nice Jamaican Lady. I really had no idea what I was doing to you. I’m sorry I made you cry. I’m sorry it seemed like whatever progress I made disappeared because I didn’t really want to do it and so I never tried very hard. I am sorry that a nice lady like you had to deal with a brat extrordinaire like me.

If it makes you feel any better, nobody else knew how to handle me either.

So mostly, they just gave up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.