Just Another Story. My Tourette's #6

Page 47.
     Concerning the reaction to my TS from friends and family... where to start, where to start, where to start...?
     I had so few friends to start with, that to a certain degree, the TS couldn't have made it worse, but it did. I was a little, gay nerd in the first place. I was bullied and beaten up a lot for being unpopular and bad at sports. So did the TS really add to that?  Not really. But it did add to the feelings by my classmates that I was a freak and beneath them. Subsequently, where the physical abuse ended, the psychological abuse began.
     My family just didn't understand what was going on, nor did I. So, my mother began me in psychotherapy when I was 12 years old, 6th grade, 1973. She assumed that my ticks were psychological in nature. I do give her credit for trying on this issue. In truth, my home life was so screwed up at that point that in a parallel universe my twitches really could've been nervous in nature. But, unfortunately, they weren't. People did address the twitches to my face; but as previously mentioned, I was so closed off and distant on every front that I couldn't even acknowledge, let alone talk about, them.
     Everybody noticed the twitches and even school mates who couldn't stand me were still curious.
    
    

Just Another Story. My Tourette's #5.

Page 46.
     I started smoking cigarettes and marijuana in the 9th grade, 1976-77. Those things relieved my Tourette's A LOT. 

Just Another Story. Tourette's Syndrome #4

Page 45.
     My Tourette's was pretty consistent (unmissed by any passerby) for the first few years, 5-7th grade, then became somewhat seasonal. It was always there mind you, but became more persistent or less, depending upon the time of year. (But now that I think of it, almost right from the start, deep winter and summer weren't quite as bad as spring and autumn.) By 8th grade though, springtime was awful, just horrific. Nowadays, I'd describe my TS during those springtimes as being in "full-bloom".
     At the time, I didn't grasp that it was ever worse or better, because I couldn't look at it objectively. I was so full of self-loathing, for many reasons, that I couldn't afford to look inward, even if to say "it seems to be better or worse right now". When people are extremely scared of their own shadow, they tend to avoid looking at that shadow, instead, trying to pretend it isn't there at all.
     And running away... always running away.    

Just Another Story. Tourette's Syndrome #3

Page 44.
     I had few of the distinctive TS vocalizations during childhood, thank God. What I did have was  excessive throat clearing, cough and sigh-sounding noise. For the most part, others rarely noticed these vocal twitches though. With me, it was all about the physical twitches.

Just Another Story. Tourette's Syndrome #2

Page 43.
     My Tourette's began benignly enough, with a simple head twitch. I though that I was just flicking my head to get my bangs out of my eyes. (That really is what my twitch resembled.) These were the days of boys having long hair and one day I simply started flicking my head to get my bangs out of my eyes. Unfortunately, then I couldn't stop.
     The twitches quickly "spread". My shoulders started getting in on the action. A shoulder shrug is what that movement resembled. Then my neck started feeling left if I wasn't flicking my head. So it filled in the gaps with a move that looked like a simple stretch, over and over. Finally, my face punctuated everything with eyebrow raises and nose twitches like Samantha from TV's Bewitched.
All in all, every part of me from the shoulders up was in perpetual motion.
     I was eleven years old. I felt like an unholy, awful mess.