Hello everyone! I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I am thankful for all for you who continue to support this blog, and this cause! In fact, because of your support, I can now confirm that my recent blog: Tourette’s is a pain. Literally. was chosen to be featured in the Tourette’s Association of american newsletter! I will provide some photos when my copy is shipped to me.
This blog post is dedicated to another step in not only becoming more comfortable with my TS, but with spreading awareness and recognition of all the little things that the disorder hinders in some way.
I feel like having TS has happened in or four different phases theough my life:
There was the phase of not knowing what it was and being accused of lying about my inability to not perform a tic.
Then came the “I’m just gonna pretend this doesn’t exist and hide so I don’t have to admit it.” phase.
Then came the realizing that this thing isn’t going to magically disappear and that I’m now an adult who can’t hide all day, so I may as well get comfortable in my skin phase. It was the phase that allowed me realize this doesn’t have to be any more of a hinder than it is on the surface, and eventually lead to me creating this blog.
Where I am at currently, is a phase of comfort that allows me to admit that, while I refuse to let my TS hinder me from living as normal of a life as I can, it does have it’s role in my everyday life that I’m tired of making excuses for. When someone questions why I do/do not do something, or why I may have an unusual anxiety over something that relates to my having Tourette’s, I’m doing my best to answer with blunt honesty. It’s not always easy, and I’m not always perfect with it because I have conditioned myself for years to make said excuses. I was afraid of how people would look at me, or pass my true feelings off as an excuse in itself.
So why now? I’m not really sure what the answer to that is, but i have a theory that as I get older I realize more how damaging it is to cover up these truths. And admitting them after making excuses for so long has been met with some blank stares, but I genuinely think that is because no one knows how they should respond. By taking this step, i hope others will follow to make this dialogue easier and more commonplace.
Tourette’s, like many diseases and disorders, isn’t always debilitating. It isn’t always even physically present. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and that it doesn’t have an impact always. It’s time to stop letting people get away with thinking so.
It’s awkward, but necessary.
Tic Talk 
Hi Brittney, Timely post. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since I watched a Chicago Hope episode the other night where the actor Rene Auberjonois played a surgeon with TS. His (unbearable) problems were largely physically visible with eye-popping tics that got him thrown out of public places. My Tourette tics, while present won’t do any more than mildly annoy people around me. For me, the hard part of TS is the comobidities that follow it around–anxiety and OCD primarily. I lump all of this into the category of TS. So even though I tic, my issues are pretty much all internal, and therefore harder to wear on my sleeve. This all came together in my head as I walked into work this morning and I decided I’d poke at it in a blog post over the next few days. One of my posts recently got retweeted by T.A.A. and it went mini-viral. Love it when the big players give me some attention. I’ll watch for yours. Thanks for keeping the conversation alive.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m glad to see that your blog is also having success! Well deserved!
And i too suffer with comorbidities, and i think that also plays into the awkwardness of admitting these things. Talking about TS is still an emotional thing for me, and add in anxiety it can really get my nervous system fired up. It’s just something I think by doing so will make it easier for others to understand what stresses chronic conditions have despite whether you’re visably ill. And no one will know unless we tell them
LikeLike