Can’t Catch a Ball? ADHD Confessions In Comics

Poor motor skills and perception explained

Oct 08, 2023

Dear readers,

It is that time of year! I always get insanely creative in fall (specifically October) and I don’t know where to start with all the ideas swimming in my mind. Maybe it’s the back-to-school effect or the changing weather and falling leaves… Whatever it is, I’m glad we are coming back to my regular one to two week-ish updates.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about about how ADHD affected my sports performance (or lack of it) in school. So, here is a piece all about that. I also published it on Medium in a slightly longer version, which you can read by clicking here.

The first ADHD symptom doctors look for is school performance in subjects like math and history. What about physical education? If your kid can’t catch a ball, they might be struggling with more than you think.

For this year’s ADHD Awareness Month, I will be focusing on lesser-known ADHD symptoms and neurodivergent struggles. One of them is the difficulty of perceiving and reacting to the physical world around us. Here are my stories and confessions, lightened up by the humor of my cartoons.

Story time

It is just another PE class in middle school. I’m waiting in line to run across the schoolyard. “9 seconds!” I can hear the teacher shouting the time to the student that has just finished. I can feel the anxiety building up. I know I will be one of the slowest in class, I always am.

It’s my turn. I run the fastest I have run in my life. I can feel the air passing, I must be going fast.

“15 seconds!” I don’t even have a point of reference, is that ok? The teacher waves gesturing I should come over. I walk over, completely in the dark as to what she might tell me. “Ana, do you have some illness or a disability related to your legs I should know about?”

“Erm, not that I know of”, I’m actually a bit worried. Did she see something wrong with me that doctors and parents haven’t noticed yet? Do I have a physical disability?

The teacher went on to clarify her position: “Well, you put your whole feet on the ground even though you were supposed to sprint.”

It turned out that everyone intuitively knew that you should not put your heels on the ground when you sprint. This was apparently something so natural that the teacher didn’t feel the need to explain.

I was not just slow, like some of my other colleagues who still ran correctly but slower. I was different. In 12 years of my life I somehow never figured out this basic fact about running. And everyone around me knew it. This was the first time in my life I felt like I was disabled (although by all accounts I was not). It wouldn’t be the last.

I was often called lazy for not being good at sports even though I really tried. I even joined a volleyball club at school but after two years of training, I still sucked at it.

Things got much clearer when 20 years later, I got diagnosed with ADHD.

Why I can’t catch a ball

One of the lesser-known symptoms or consequences of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) are poor movement skills. These can include fine motor skills like handwriting and gross motor skills like running and jumping. As a child, I had normally developing fine motor skills, but my gross motor skills were abysmal.

I could never catch a ball. I tripped on the stairs so many times, even when I was going up. I was so clumsy that I got afraid of doing pretty much anything physical. A fear that I have held onto until today.

The lack of attention in people with ADHD can lead to poor visuo-spatial processing (Cummins et al. 2005), which could explain why ADHDers often have poor motor skills.

Poor motor skills can, in turn, lead to low self-esteem, which then naturally leads to the well-known problems of anxiety and depression that often persist into adulthood. Pan et al. (2009) also highlight this connection:

The motor skills performance observed in children with ASD and ADHD is worse than those without a disability on measures of gross motor development as well as locomotor and object control skills. Poor motor performance is highly related to low self-esteem, to higher levels of anxiety and to poor social functioning (Cummins et al. 2005).

Why I don’t understand where things are

Ok, I can’t catch a ball, but you would think that navigating between stationary things is an easier task. Guess again, because I also can’t tell where people or objects are even when they are not moving! I often start walking during an otherwise seated conversation imagining that my interlocutor will just follow me wherever I go. It’s almost like I don’t even take into consideration that they are a separate person from me and don’t automatically move with me. Also, if I can hear myself, why can’t they?

After the fact and after making this comic I can acknowledge it is bizarre to think I can be in two places at once, but it feels so real in the moment that I cannot even notice it’s happening before it’s too late and the other person complains. You can’t imagine just how frustrating it feels when people catch me messing up in this way during a conversation. Frustration and low self-esteem? Not a great combo.

Silver lining

The final question for all of us who are bad at physical stuff is whether we want to get better and how. Personally I am not interested in learning how to get better at sports including a ball. As an adult, I have nothing to prove to anyone and I am fine with not being able to catch a ball. Recently, however, I have found the only sport on this planet at which I don’t suck.

That sport is, drums please, yoga! For whatever reason (maybe because I have zero muscle), I seem to have the natural flexibility and stretchiness required for yoga. Finally, after years of feeling like a sports failure, I have found something I can actually enjoy. And unlike other sports, yoga is not competitive. The objective is not to win over someone, but to be in tune with your body and stay healthy. If we could make other sports in school to be about that, I am sure more neurodivergent kids would enjoy them.

What was your sports experience like in school? Let me know if the comments! And if you liked this, click the heart!

Thank you for reading!

Until next time,

Ana