Why I Cant Clean my House

I have always known I'm not normal. Many of my teachers would tell me they knew I had to have some sort of learning disability but they couldn't figure out what. The half hearted attempt the school made in testing me in 6th grade was to no avail. They said they could tell something was wrong. My reflexes were slow, I couldn't get things in order, I had no concept of time, and I was the clumsiest kid they had seen. But then again, maybe I was just not trying and maybe I was trying to just get attention. Boy were they wrong.

You have to attempt to understand the frustration of trying harder than that kid who got the A. I tried way way harder then Him and I only got a C. Can you imagine that? If you had/have a learning disability then you most certainly can.

My quandary I found most recently is, what do you call it when it's no longer a learning disability? I'm no longer in school, so what is? This answer was kindly given to me by the face blindness support group on yahoo groups. A Cognitive dysfunction. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to call it a neurological problem or not. I'll get to that in a moment. I'm jumping the gun here.

Face blindness is a condition where you cannot recognize people, even people you should be able to recognize. I can recognize close friends and immediate family when they get really close to me, but I cannot recognize them in a crowd or if they walk up to me in an unfamiliar location until they get really really close. The technical name for face blindess is Prosopagnosia. You might have heard of it recently, it's been making the news and popular television in the United States.

While chatting with the faceblind group they told me of a few other cognitive dysfunctions that they have found are fairly common among their bunch. Once of those is dyspraxia. What a whammy suddenly seeing all my problems mirrored back to me on the dyspraxia websites. Which I might add, I thought most of the dyspraxia websites were pretty poor. They jumbled around the symptons and I thought they grouped some conditions together that weren't appropriate and made some pretty big assumptions about people with the condition. But all in all at least they gave me a big ah-ha!

Twenty years searching for answers, and I finally hit upon it. I guess it is fairly unknown in some circles. Dyspraxia is a condition with is classified as an Order processing condition. It is fairly well established by many of the websites that the left and the right side of the brain don't work well together. They cant get things in the right order and work together properly.

Different people experience this in different ways and other people frequently have different addition cognitive dysfunctions or neurological symptoms as well.

Most common is clumsiness. For a while educators even named it Clumsy Child Syndrome. Many people with dyspraxia also have dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, aspergers, autism, dysgraphia and a host of other common problems. The most common thing is that people may have one and not the other of the problems.

The most comforting part of reading up on it is that people with dyspraxia are quite generally thoroughly disorganized and cannot keep a house! That's right people, cannot keep a house. So I guess I'm not as awful as I thought I was, it's not just plain ineptitude that causes me to not be able to keep house, it's the same problem that caused me years of learning disabilities as a child.

Unfortunately there's not really any treatment.

If you think you may have this problem here's a list of websites I found that were useful. Please note the 'useful' phrase. It doesn't mean I really thought they were the greatest, just that I could decipher useful information from them.

http://www.dyspraxiaireland.com/

http://www.nldline.com/newpage41.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyspraxia

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/members/madeleine.portwood/dysprax.htm

http://www.tayloredmktg.com/dyspraxia/interact.shtml#dyspraxia

Please be kind to that weird and ditzy coworker of yours. You have no idea what s/he has gone through in all the years. Maybe s/he suffers from dyspraxia. You never know.