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Nix Your Tics!

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Life's A Twitch! Celebrating 15 years.
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Life's A Twitch! Celebrating 15 years.

 

Ashley

Hello there my name is Ashley, I'm a 17 yr. old student in Australia who has recently been diagnosed with TS. I don't dwell on that fact I have TS. There is no point dwelling on something that is out of your hands, "the powerful play goes on". I don't resent the fact that I have TS, quite to the contrary the tic is an integral part of me. The suffering that my life has brought has defined my character. And it isn't the tic that afflicts me as such, rather societies prejudice. I'm not ashamed of having TS or any of the other associated disorders I may or many not have, it is what sets me apart from everyone else. it is what makes me Ashley Adams. Also I have written this piece of writing for school....for raising awareness about Tourette Syndrome and it's related disorders.


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.

****

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.

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Last updated on March 25, 2022

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