Ed's Tourette's

I thought it might be interesting to talk about the effects Tourette Syndrome can have on something as basic as our ability to participate in a conversation. My wife and I have a 2 year old son now, and a huge percentage of our interactions with him are based around helping him learn to speak. He's right on schedule as far as learning goes. He can parrot just about any word he hears, though he hasn't quite mastered the "v" sound yet. It's really endearing when he says, "I luh you!" Verbal communication is so important from such an early age. Yeah, it's important to be able to write coherently, but have you ever heard someone yell, "Quick! Write 911!" No. No you have not. Which is why it can be so frustrating that TS can have such a negative impact on our speech. I try never to speak (HA!) for anyone else in my blog, so I'll stick mostly to my own experience. I have a ton of mouth and jaw tics that interfere with my speech regularly, t...

There are a ton of resources online for parents whose kids have TS, and rightly so. Every child with Tourette who is loved and supported from diagnosis day on is a child who will grow up loving themself, TS and all. Unquestionably good. But what about the opposite situation? What if, on top of all the challenges of becoming a new parent, you're also a person with Tourette Syndrome? I sure don't have all the answers, but I'm going to share my observations, strategies, fears, and coping mechanisms with you here. Away we go! Congratulations! You're going to be a parent! It's going to be great! Awful challenges that turn out to be totally worth it! A strengthened bond with your partner when your baby is crying and you agree to ignore it for another five minutes! Changing diapers, which it turns out never gets less gross! The certain knowledge that sleep is for the weak and that there is, in fact an amount of spit-up you can tolerate on your clothes without getting cha...

Tourette's and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, but the horse just can't stop ticcing and so the carriage is constantly bouncing around and the occupants are being tossed about like a bag of popcorn mid-pop. I'm writing this mostly as an excuse to ask other people how having Tourette Syndrome has affected their marriages and relationships, but I'm also writing it because the more I think about it, the more I realize that my TS has played a prominent role in the shape my marriage has today. I often wonder how that shape would be different if I didn't have TS or if I'd been diagnosed long before my wife and I met and it was a known quantity in my life. Also, my wife is amazing and she deserves a blog post about how just amazing she is. First, some dating background. I fell in love for the first time when I was seventeen, and it was exactly how all the songs said it would be like. Just a life changing, "I want to feel like this forever" f...

Hey, look! I still have a blog! I can even write stuff in it! It's been two months since I posted in here, and it's been two rough months with my TS. I had a toothache a while ago that piqued the interest of my Tourette's, which I'm now referring to as  Freddie Mercury . Freddie started up a new tic where I click or clack or occasionally slam together the teeth just on the right side of my mouth. It feels like the original toothache is gone, but the tic, just like the alien spaceship in Independence Day after President Whitmore ordered a nuclear strike on it, remains.  And it, my friends is a BEAST. Excepting the sharp head nod/jerk I had when I was a kid (and which, like an old friend, pops up from time to time), this is definitely my all-time worst tic. It is freaking ceaseless. It's an all day, every day kind of tic. Most of the time I have a few tic-free minutes when I wake up in the morning, but this thing is on me within seconds of waking up. I must be doing...

I always hesitate to involve myself in big Tourette community outcry efforts like the one being brought against NBC's Chuck Todd in response to his use of the word "Tourette" as an adjective to describe, in effect, an asshole on the internet. I've never been inclined to police another person's speech, though I realize now that's a privilege I own as a straight white cisgender able-bodied Christian middle class American male. People aren't generally saying police-able things about people like me, and sadly we're frequently the ones saying the abhorrent stuff. I also think that complaining "@" a person on the internet is a little like getting so angry that you scream at the stars. It might feel good, but no one is really listening. It's a generational thing, and I'm caught in the middle of it: I'm old enough to remember the 18 years before I even had an email address, but not old enough to have a kid who regularly uses the internet....

I started in a new role at work a few weeks ago and it's been going well TS-wise. I was worried that the stimuli involved in learning a new job might set me up for a rough time with my tics, but I was only sort of right. I work for an industrial supply company, and for the last five years I've been working alongside some great people in our freight department. If our whole building sends out 14k orders a day, our department of 17-ish people only handles around 400-450 of those. Our orders were typically for the biggest stuff we sell, and each order required a fair bit of critical thinking to process. I could explain that even further, but if you haven't already bailed on this entry, you surely would have by the time I was done. The pace took wild swings, from casually working to frantically running around like lunatics literally trying to fit 10,000 pounds into a 5,000 pound box. Those lengthy periods of casual work were bad for my tics, which seem to become worse the more ...

Lately I've been struggling to sit down and write on here or anywhere else. I'm so self-conscious doing it that it almost causes anxiety just thinking about it. The reasons here are threefold: one, I'm still loath to share this much of myself. Two, I'm constantly doubting that I have thoughts worth sharing, and three, I'm worried that my content isn't high-quality. This is a real problem for me, since the only thing I've ever really wanted to do with my life (aside from playing first base for the Yankees) is be an author. To actually hold a book I wrote in my hands, to talk about it with people, and to have those people make my work something that touches their lives and stays with them. I can not, for the life of me, convince myself that it's worth my time to sit down and spend years of my life trying to actually get good at this. I blame, in part, my companion  Wesley Crusher . Wesley is a dick, but I've had him mostly in the  brig  since I reali...