I
Tic Therefore I Am.
What does
the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the famous physicist
Albert Einstein and the American inventor Nikola Tesla all share in
common. The answer is they all displayed tics . To be more precise historians
believe that they may have suffered from Tourette Syndrome. First recognised
by the French physician Gilles de la Tourette the disorder is an inherited
disease of the nervous system, characterised by tics. A tic is broadly
defined as any involuntary, repetitive and rapid movement, sound or
thought. In times past people who had the disorder were thought to be
possessed by demons and burnt at the stake, or were locked up in insane
asylums. Fortunately over the years as our understanding of the brain
has improved our society has become more tolerant of this mysterious
illness, that effects 1 in every 1000 persons. What makes us tic you
ask, is the exact same chemical responsible for all human sensual experience,
and that most human of emotions, love. The chemical I'm referring to
is off course Dopamine, the feel good chemical of the brain. TS sufferers
like myself have a cornucopia of it, which produces a temporary state
of excitement in us, hence causing us to twitch. Indeed Oliver Sacks
describes it as a kind of "orgasm of the brain". Ostensibly
the tics are the brains way of solemnizing.
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While this
is all well and good. For the millions of us who have the disorder it
is more than merely a biochemical imbalance of the brain, it is a necessity
of life, it is an innate biological urge to do something unexpected,
out of the ordinary and spontaneous. Life is abounds with necessity
and it is necessity that is the mother of invention. Just as any "normal"
person needs to go to work everyday to make ends meet, we need to tic.
After a while the occasional twitch every now and then becomes a ritual,
to be performed on a regular basis. But our species is renowned for
it's obsession with rituals, Catholics cross themselves, brides and
grooms say weddings vows and so on. All of which are just as illogical
as what we do. Yet our society deems these behaviours to be "normal"
and ours to be "abnormal".
But normality
isn't all it's cracked up to be. After all was Einstein normal?, was
Mozart normal?. I think not, but than again this all depends on what
one defines as normal. The Oxford dictionary defines normal as "Conforming
with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level,
or type; typical". I gather this makes Einstein and Mozart most
abnormal than. In fact none of the people aforementioned were "normal".
Quite to the contrary, they yearned to be different from everyone else,
they were the eccentrics of their day, regarded by their peers as crackpots
and ostracised from mainstream society. As is often the case with geniuses
it was their eccentricity that underlined their creativity. It is eccentrics
who have made the world go around, and we owe it to their idiosyncrasies
The tics
are analogous to a small child, who stubbornly disobeys it's parent,
they can be recalcitrant things at times. And like a small child they
are in constant need of gratification. Born out of a refusal to conform
to the dictums of polite society, they are in essence a sort of insurrection
of the mind. They are forever disobeying me, and the more I try to suppress
them the more uppity they get. Eventually I am forced to wilt and capitulate
to my innate biological urges. Those temptations are the obstinate child
in us all, what Freud termed the id, and the more we try to resist them
the more we deny our very own existence's.
It is not
the tics that afflict me as such, rather other peoples intolerance of
them, because of their need to conform to what is right, which is in
the austere opinion of this writer the most severe of neurological disorders.
It is human nature to stigmatise what one does not understand. As much
as I find them to be a needless distraction at times. I know that those
twitches make me who I am. I am as much a part of the tic as it is a
part of me. It is what sets me apart from everybody else and makes me
an individual. Those innate biological urges aren't just little annoyances
now and then, they form an integral part of my existence. I tic therefore
I am.