Constructional Apraxia

[tigriswolf]

Title: Constructional Apraxia
Written: spring 2015

So, I have a minor learning disability. I was not informed about it until college. In spring 2015, I took a class where we had to write seven snapshots about something in our lives; I wrote two poems. This is one of them.

I was asked to read it aloud in class, which I barely managed. It wasn't until recently that I began feeling curiosity about my disability (disorder?), and it was difficult finding information on it. I'm also finally at peace with it.

I struggled every class, rereading the instructions,
staring at the numbers, the formulas,
until I could see nothing at all.
I tried and it made no difference
so I eventually gave up.

My mother is an engineer
so math has always come easily to her.
Too, my little sister does math for fun.
Sitting in class was pointless and my mind always wandered
no matter how I tried to stay on task.

I used to wonder if my clever little sister was smarter than me.
I never thought I couldn’t do it because I was a girl –
my mother showed me otherwise.
I thought, sometimes, perhaps I was just stupid.
All through middle- and high-school, while I fought so hard
I passed through sheer willpower because I refused to fail.
I fought and fought so hard
but while I could do it by rote, I never understood it.

I knew, even while I feared, that I was not stupid.
I read everything that wasn’t math and I comprehended.
I want to learn interesting things.

I graduated and went to college
and my mother finally told me something she’d known
since I was a fourth-grader.

I’m not stupid.
I have constructional apraxia.
I don’t really understand place value or 3-d images,
graphs, charts, and diagrams.
Numbers don’t speak to me the way they do to my
engineer mother and engineer little sister.
It will never matter how hard I try
or fight
or beat my head bloody against the book –

I don’t like math because math doesn’t like me.
I am not stupid. I just see different things.

I was not lazy.
But I fought and I fought and it made no difference
so for the longest time, I stopped fighting.

My parents knew since fourth grade
but didn’t tell me until I entered college.
Would it have mattered, if I had known?
Would I have tried so long or given up sooner?
I don’t know.

A few times in college, I felt stupid.
I sat in geology lab trying to build a 3-d replica
of the concept we were learning.
I looked at the instructions, I looked at my peers,
and when I tried, my fingers fumbled and it just wouldn’t work.
I wanted to cry. I felt deficient,
like I lacked something everyone else had.
That moment was the stupidest I’ve ever felt in my life
because somewhere between my brain and my fingers,
there was an insurmountable gap.

I know I’m not stupid.
My brain speaks a different language than most people.
I inherited it from my father,
which he never knew until that afternoon they tested me.

Numbers don’t speak to me.
Words do.
My little sister speaks fluent math
and she reads voraciously
but she does not understand poetry.
She describes math
the way I describe
words fitting together perfectly.

I spent years of my life wondering what was wrong with me.
I beat my head bloody against textbooks,
I had to do it step-by-step no matter how many times I did it
and somewhere, something usually went wrong.
But I refused to fail, no matter how it hurt,
and I rejoiced when I graduated because
I’d only have to do one math class ever again.

I have constructional apraxia.
Some things will never make sense
but that’s not my fault and it’s not a problem to be fixed.
It just is.
Math and I are not friends,
barely even acquaintances,
but I am not stupid.
I fought and I won,
and calculators are wonderful things.

I am not stupid.
I just see the world a different way.

Comments

[noybusiness.livejournal.com]

That's a great piece. I have Asperger's Syndrome. Did you ever see my article about it?

http://www.buffalo.edu/atbuffalo/article-page-winter-2015.host.html/content/shared/www/atbuffalo/articles/winter-2015/features/aspie.detail.html

And it got some followup comments in the next issue: http://www.buffalo.edu/atbuffalo/article-page-winter-2015.host.html/content/shared/www/atbuffalo/articles/spring-2015/in-every-issue/inbox.detail.html

[tigriswolf]

I had not seen those; I'll check them out.

Thanks for reading!

[noybusiness.livejournal.com]

Thanks; let me know what you think. I'm also a very visual thinker and synesthete. All my thoughts are in pictures, colors and textures. Everything is associated with a color, including specific seasons of TV shows. I remember things as images (still or moving) and sounds of what happened. I see everything I hear or say written in text form. I didn't realize for a long time that other people didn't, and still can't imagine what it's like to think of a word without thinking of its letters.

Sometimes, it makes keeping left and right straight difficult, because left is a blue, smooth word and right is a red, hard word, but the direction of left is red and hard and the direction of right is blue and smooth, so they should each have the other name.