The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

Shy: adjective- nervous or timid in the company of other people. It's a part of my personality that I really hate. I can write endless monologues online yet few people I know in real life have experienced me talking for any length of time. Shy Guy from Super Mario Dyspraxia can make conversations more difficult because my brain takes longer than most people to process what has been said. This means there can be awkwardly long gaps as my brain processes and then formulates a response. Regularly someone will say something to me and I'll laugh or say "yeah" and it takes me a good five minutes to realise what they were referring to and then realise my response was inadequate. Ultimately though, dyspraxia is not the cause of my shyness. I don't think anything is really the cause, it's just part of who I am. It takes me a while to become comfortable around new people and to come out of my shell. It's different with every person and for no tangible reason...

I discovered this week that you can download all the information Facebook keeps on you. Given what we know about the social network these days, it seems likely plenty of other people have this information too. Through this data you can see everything you've ever shared on Facebook as well as every comment, every like and every message. This is not really too surprising seeing as though we can scroll through and see this most of this stuff for ourselves. Some of the Facebook history seems a bit weird. One page gives you what you've answered to polls. I can't resist answering a poll when I see one and you can see every answer you've given. What's a little weird is it doesn't give you the question or the other options, it just lists who posed the question and what you answered. This makes for strange reading with some of my answers being '7th Doctor's umbrella', '36 metres (118 feet), 'I switch mine off every night' and the really quite di...

The 'About' page on this blog has been sitting there forlornly for the past few months awaiting an update. Today I am finally getting around to writing it and I thought I'd share it as a proper post too. In the 19th century the poorest members of society were sent to the workhouse, a place where they suffered terribly, often living in squalid conditions, forced to work menial jobs with minimal food. By the late 20th century one of these workhouses had become a hospital but the building had not yet finished unleashing suffering on the local population- for that was where I entered the world. My entry to the world was about as awkward as the rest of my life. I got tangled in the umbilical chord and required a Ventouse machine, essentially a vacuum for foetuses, in order to be extracted. For several days my head was pointed and this complicated arrival in the world is the most likely reason I have dyspraxia. Dyspraxia is a mild learning difficulty that used be known as ...

My first real experience of anxiety is one of my earliest clear memories. I was about five and in my first year at school. When you're five school is a lot of fun and I adored being there. Except for one afternoon when the teacher told us we were going to draw the parts of a bicycle. I would actually find this is a difficult task as an adult but aged five I had just as much chance of flapping my wings and learning how to fly. I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach as my entire being tried to resist. In the end, I projectile vomited across the classroom and was sent home and never had to complete the task.  As we grow up we have more experiences and are much better able to cope with new experiences. I did tend to feel anxious about things I considered important though. I regularly had a nosebleed when taking exams from year two SATs to at least one GSCE paper. It didn't really take much for me to have a nosebleed throughout my childhood anyway but anxiety seemed to b...

Like most other single twenty-somethings I find myself using dating apps like Tinder. I don't use them that much but when I have a spare few minutes I find myself swiping furiously. "Swiping furiously" is not a euphemism and refers to the process of swiping left or right depending on whether you want to match with someone on the app. I find that I get very few matches and can never quite understand why that is. Whilst I don't consider myself particularly attractive, for my own sanity I have to assume that some women are attracted to me. Even if only 5% of everyone that sees me on the app swipe right then I still ought to be getting more matches than I do. Maybe it's me. To match with someone both parties need to state that they want to match with each other. Am I too fussy when I'm swiping? Whilst I hate the way these apps promote physical appearance, that is the first thing I find myself judging before swiping. I'm not especially judgmental when it...

At the start of the year I pledged to walk a thousand miles this calendar year. #walk1000miles is a challenge run by Country Walking  magazine and I decided to only count 'boots-on' miles; I do a lot of steps at work so I'm only counting miles I do when heading out for a walk rather than the actual distance I walk in total. This week I reached the half-way point of the challenge, having achieved over five hundred miles so far. It's been brilliant so far as I've rambled my way across the Hampshire and Dorset countryside. Whilst I've enjoyed walking for some time, my love for it has grown this year. Medical professionals are increasingly realising that spending time in nature can be excellent for your health, both physical and mental. The early part of last year was a really miserable time for me and as the new year began I couldn't help but be fearful that I was in for a repetition of it. Fortunately my work life was significantly better than it was in 2018...

Being dyspraxic can be really embarrassing. A lack of co-ordination and clumsiness leads to endless scenarios where you want to crawl into a hole and never come out. This week, I thought I'd share some of my most embarrassing moments. February 2001, Center Parcs Longleat Forest We were on a family holiday in Center Parcs- my parents, my brother, a family friend and me. Someone had the bright idea of hiring bikes. I was about nine at the time and was just about able to ride a bike around the local housing estate without falling off. What nobody considered was that Center Parcs is not a flat housing estate and has plenty of hills. Shortly after hiring the bikes, we found ourselves heading up an incline. It wasn't exactly Mount Everest but I was wobbly at the best of times on a bicycle. The incline slowed me down enough to cause the wobbling to be somewhat worse. Inevitably, I wobbled too close to the edge of the road and ending up tipping off my bike. To make matters worse, ...