One particularly stressful day a few years ago, while driving to an important work event, I was seized with a severe bout of tics. This was not unusual for me. I’d been ticcing nearly all my life, and stress always exacerbated my tics.
On this day, my snorts and jerks were so out of control that I rear-ended a car. That’s when I finally visited a neurologist. I needed to know, literally, what made me tic. What he told me — “You have Tourette syndrome” — came as a shock.
It was also a relief. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the characteristic vocal and motor tics associated with the condition. Secreting them away in my mental lockbox, burying them well out of sight of others, was how I dealt with them. A diagnosis brought clarity, and it meant that I could deal with my tics in a healthier way — or so I thought.
I grew up in a small western New York town in the 1980s, those heady days of ozone-depleting hair spray, goofy mullets and syrupy synth pop. In my rural community, very few people knew what Tourette was. I certainly didn’t.
When I was a teenager, a television program, possibly “60 Minutes,” aired an episode on the subject that I watched with my mom. It featured a young man who shouted obscenities in some large American city. By that time I’d been ticcing for years — in fact, I’d already been hiding my tics for years. But I didn’t recognize myself in this program, because never, not once, did I swear or shout in public.
When I was in elementary school, a teacher once stopped class to tell me to quit making noises and “doing that thing you’re doing with your head.” She actually demonstrated “that thing” in front of my classmates because I was apparently annoying her and disrupting her lesson. Every head turned my way, and I put mine down, humiliated. I could not tell her that I couldn’t help myself.
In birding, there’s something called a “spark bird” —…
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