When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with a condition called dyspraxia — a motor-coordinational learning disability that means that writing by hand, while also incredibly hard to read, is both physically and mentally painful for me. Every time I pick up a pen to write something longer than a sentence I feel genuinely frustrated, the signals from my brain to my hand never quite syncing up, with every letter feeling like a nasty little picture that reminds me that I am, on some level, quite broken. And, unsurprisingly, this led to incredibly bad grades in secondary school whenever I was faced with writing at length — I’d leave exams feeling mentally exhausted, and knowing I’d failed.
One day, an occupational therapist made the call to the school that I would need the ability to type my exams, to which the initial response was “why?” and her response was “have you ever seen him write?” She had watched as I painfully tried to complete exercises during therapy, and asked me if I was good at typing, to which I responded that I was not confident I was better at anything else.
You see, the computer has been my solace in many ways — the escape of online gaming, the ability to talk to friends in other countries — but one of the most important ones is my ability to communicate. I was intellectually stunted by my nasty little goblin hands, quite literally told by teachers that I was stupid (and worse!) because my work was regularly equal parts clunky and impossible-to-read. When I started being able to type my homework…
