In 2024, I found myself uncharacteristically on trend. I was approaching the end of a doctorate and, ahead of my viva, I had finally got around to doing something I had been putting off for years and underwent an assessment for dyspraxia.
I started a doctorate in education during the pandemic while on furlough from my job in the study abroad sector. I had always secretly harboured a desire to undertake a PhD, blaming a lack of time and money for never doing so. But I also lacked the confidence to start. Academically successful on paper, I had aced my A levels, then my degree, and later a master’s. Yet I always felt that I had completed each one by the skin of my teeth – that I had somehow blagged my way through – and was both relieved and surprised that nobody had noticed.
I had a chaotic way of approaching assignments, often diving into the middle of an essay rather than starting at the beginning, as I assumed normal people did. My handwritten notes were illegible. I would throw in ostentatious quotes and be pleasantly surprised when markers seemed to fall for it, praising my “sophisticated arguments”. I vowed that each qualification I took would be my last – because next time I would surely buckle under the pressure and get found out.
I was never supposed to do anything academic at all. When my parents adopted me in 1982, they were warned that I was expected to be “educationally subnormal” (they didn’t sugar-coat things in the 1980s) and would probably end up in special education. Both my birth parents had been given that label, and my difficult background and added stresses before birth made it – they thought – almost inevitable.
However, my adoptive mother, a teacher herself, took this as a challenge. She taught me to read before I even went to school to give me a head start. I also benefited from a love of learning and, especially, writing. I was curious and chatty and creative.
Still, school proved difficult. I was the awkward kid whose knees were permanently grazed from tripping in the playground. I was the child on the verge of tears because she just couldn’t learn to tie her shoelaces (I was once asked to do so publicly while the entire class waited and watched, sniggering). I was criticised for inconsistent and messy work, and my school reports were peppered with phrases such as: “Polly is constantly careless in her work”.
At the end of my GCSEs, my school recommended that I focus on music because I had “a lovely singing voice” and was “never going to do much academically”. Fortunately, I found that focusing on a limited number of subjects at A level suited me much better, and while I was still prone to making errors (I would read a page over and over but somehow still miss them) I began to achieve.
But the negative comments from school reports stayed with me, and they hurt. It was not true that I was careless: I cared so much, which made it all the more painful when I nonetheless continually got things wrong. Hence, rather than gaining confidence each time I graduated to the next level of study, instead I felt more and more of an imposter.
In 2016 I was working in student services at a London university when a colleague, having watched me struggle to put on a jumper, asked me if I was dyspraxic. Initially I believed this was purely a coordination disorder and conceded – remembering the shoelace incident and my reliable inability to hit or catch a ball – that I probably was. However, reading up on it, I found that the condition was more complicated and wide-reaching.
Dyspraxia, it turned out, can also affect how you collect and retain information, learn new skills, organise your time and even regulate your emotions. Regularly feeling overwhelmed to the verge of panic, reading about these symptoms was like reading a description of myself.
By then, however, I was already educated to master’s level and had a good job with management responsibilities. A diagnosis would be interesting and potentially even reassuring, but I didn’t feel that getting one would serve any practical value.
In 2024, I changed my mind. By then, my impostor syndrome had kicked in to a degree I had never experienced before. Difficulties and inconsistencies around organisation and other skills felt magnified as I juggled my studies with a demanding day job. With more than 1,000 pages of qualitative data to analyse and facing a thesis whose bibliography alone was longer than any essay I’d ever written before, I was convinced that this time I’d gone too far. What did I think I was doing? How could I be so arrogant?
Even though the assessment confirmed what I – and everyone who knew me – had suspected for years, the results were a revelation. I was not just dyspraxic, I was extremely dyspraxic. Suddenly both the careless child and stressed adult were vindicated. While there were few adjustments that could be put in place at this stage in my academic career, I did declare the disability ahead of my viva, giving me perhaps the best personal adjustment I could have: confidence. For the first time in almost 40 years in education I walked into a room knowing that I was doing my best, that my best had been good enough before so, hopefully, it would be good enough again – and, if not, there was nothing more I could do.
I enjoyed my viva immensely and, crucially, I passed. My thesis was published, and I now have a doctoral certificate on my wall.
There has been a lot of scepticism in the press recently over the unprecedented rise in the diagnoses of learning differences and neurodiversity but, for me, diagnosis was empowering. It turns out I am not an impostor at all. I am, rather, living proof that neither your own inner monologue of doubt, nor the dismal predictions of teachers and social workers, nor even a neurodevelopmental condition need hold you back from achieving academically.
Polly Penter is a recent doctoral graduate of the University of West London and a study abroad professional.
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