The comfort away from The Zone

I was feeling apprehensive and for a few short moments, it was easier to create a delusion that some kind of parallel world where I was practical. Practical Ben, women all falling over for Ben, Ben who finds getting dressed easy...The reality though was far less glamorous I was about 200 miles North of Brisbane ready to embark on 4 months of 'farm work'.

The facts were relatively straightforward in order to avoid an English winter, I needed to do 88 days of manual hard labour to extend my Australian visa. I found myself in a tropical working hostel being probed by a guy the hostel owner, who I knew would not appreciate the nuances of Dyspraxics. You will have to get used to these types of people, unfortunately, they lurk along every cliff path, every classroom, and every train. These guys will think you are drunk, these plonkers will dismiss you and roll their eyes. They will always voice their opinion.

Anyway, farm work would mean long, hard days and confusingly early 5 am mornings, 7 days a week. It would leave me and my fellow workers with temporarily bad backs and black circled eyes. Mike, the owner of the hostel: Shoestrings, was surprisingly accommodating but I didn't bother with any explanation of Dyspraxia. I would need to conserve as much energy as possible to complete the farm work. However, the strategy with Mike would be one of professional charm I needed him to like me and rate my hard-working streak. I desperately wanted that visa extension.

Backpackers need a strategy to get through the fruit and vegetable picking. A strategy for watching flashy people pick treble the buckets I picked, a strategy to make some money, and a strategy to get the 88 days of farm needed. On the journey up to Bundaberg from Sydney, I had decided that I didn't need to make friends all I really needed to was get the cliché done.

Dyspraxics need sometimes to make sacrifices, don't get angry or upset about it if we are to compete with the physically more capable. Shoestrings had a reputation for being sociable and on occasion party hostel. I would love to have taken part but I wouldn't have had the energy to take part. So for me, it was bed by nine every night and up and out in the morning.

One of the odd things that people accuse Dyspraxics of being is being helpless. I had a difficult birth and there was an incubator involved. Close friends would accept that I'm very independent, that there is simply no point in telling me what to do because it will be done my way. This is not to say that compromises are not essential to being an adult, they are, but compromises will be achieved only if I am left to my own devices.

About halfway through the farm work I felt a bit isolated but was still resolute that the misery would be offset by the long-term prospect of a second year in Sydney. Barring a brief flirtation of needing approval in my early twenties, I have never needed to be loved. I simply do know why love is so important to people. Please learn to be independent in thought, your dyspraxia depends on in it.

The comfort zone of sitting in the office with tea and anecdotally special workmates was beginning to be shed. It wasn't altogether comfortable living in a sweaty eight-to-room, farm-working hostel but it was oddly satisfying. I found the fact that I was working so hard for a goal, doing something previously foreign to me, was almost in-toxifying. I was away from a world of Alderney beaches and Oxford pubs.

My challenge to you is to try and leave your comfort zone. Try just for once to compete with those idiots who get all the women and all of the tries, goals, or points. Fight for everything you have. Go and learn what you can do and banish all negative thoughts of failure.

Picking tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes, and peppers are not a Dyspraxic's dream but the activity is not impossible. Sometimes you have to start with what appears impossible and just give it a real go. I did in the picking fields of Bundaberg and there is no reason why you shouldn't. Just remember how soul-destroying drizzly, foggy late November are. Pretty bad, aren't they?

Back in the comforts of a clean Sydney hostel about a month later, I got my second-year visa. This was late September. There would be no need to go back to England for the short days of Autumn and winter. For Mike, I am very grateful , you let me complete the farm work thank you so, so much...