Thread by @BlokeOnWheels

Right, here we go as promised yesterday a thread on the #StartleReflex and why I find it so incredibly frustrating. 1

It's quite common among babies to have such a reflex which causes them to 'jump out of their skin' at the slightest little unexpected noise. While many people soon grow out of it, that's not the case for an unlucky gang of which I am a member. Part of the impact of my 2

Cerebral palsy means that I have this reflex for life. This means that whenever I hear an unexpected or unpleasantly loud noise I am always prone to the overfull feeling of being momentarily gripped with a sense of confusion while I work out what's going on. It's even worse 3

If there are several such noises in quick succession as these can force me to be on edge for at least a few minutes while I manage to calm down and remind myself that everything is in fact fine. When this happens at home, it's easy to manage and I'm very self-deprecating 4

I often take the piss out of it around my family, as I do with every other aspect of my disability. However, when it happens while I'm out in a place where I'm likely to encounter people who don't know me very well, the sight of me jumping can be initially confusing for them. 5

And it can be ever so slightly embarrassing when I have to explain the situation. It sometimes makes me feel as if I'm somehow less of an adult. I know that sounds utterly ridiculous, but it is after all not common behaviour for people who are nearly 29 years old. 6

The most debilitating aspect of this actually occurred when I was at school, because every time a teacher raised their voice to try, (and often fail) to restore a semblance of order in a noisy classroom, I would experience a reflex reaction. There were some days where...7

I couldn't face going to particular lessons because I knew it would be such an awful experience. GCSE German was a class which made me particularly anxious because I knew there was no chance of the lesson ever progressing without roughly 10 occurrences. So in the end...8

I kind of ended up teaching myself (these were the days before Duolingo was the thing) and managed to get a c, which was the highest grade I could get because I took the foundation paper. The thing that really annoys me is that until my GCSE years...9

I adored learning German, I was really good at it, and I feel that just being in that particular environment during my GCSE studies, and the effect it had on me, robbed me of being able to take the more advanced paper and get a higher grade (I probably wouldn't have passed) 10

That's one of the reasons I'm so determined to learn German now, because I feel I could have done so much better if the startle reflex and a particularly disinterested and uncooperative class of fellow students hadn't inadvertently combined to create such an intolerable... 11

Situation for me. You're probably wondering why I have ended up telling you all this. I just feel the need to tell you about all the little things that go on in my life that you would probably never even think of. I've accepted that this will be something that will be with...12

Me for life, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating to find myself needing to be scraped off the ceiling every time somebody gets angry on the telly! And don't get me fucking started on smoke alarms when they run out of battery! Thank you so much for reading . 13

#DisabilityLife #StartleReflex

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