Hey guys! I am now on Thanksgiving break, and it’s so nice to be home! Home-cooked meals, sleeping my with puppy, seeing my high school friends … what more could I ask for? So, I’m very happy to be at home, and my friend from high school will be coming over so she can meet my puppy and so we can catch up! I’m excited! And I get to eat Thanksgiving food and it’s my birthday in just 7 days!!! Yay!
Anyway, besides all that I wanted to share with you guys a little Tourette moment I had the other week. At my college, a bunch of Indian dance groups put on a giant Diwali performance in our main theater on campus, and I went with a bunch of my friends from my floor to see the performance.
The performance was excellent, and I really really enjoyed it! It was 3 hours, though, and I was holding back my vocal tics, so my motor tics got pretty bad. Luckily, I was sitting next to my closest friends in college, who totally understand, so they didn’t even turn their heads when my motor tic where I hit myself in the chest and arm started acting up.
After the Diwali performance was over, we all went to eat dinner on campus. Halfway through our dinner, a guy who I didn’t know joined us. He knew one of my friends who we were eating dinner with, but I hadn’t met him before. I, of course, was still doing my chest hitting tic, though.
After about 10 minutes of sitting with us, he asked me, “Why are you hitting yourself in the chest?” I really didn’t know the guy, and I probably wasn’t going to see him again, really, so I tried to brush the question off without telling him I had Tourette. He was persistent, though, and wasn’t very happy with my non-Tourette explanation, so he then asked me, “Is it like a dominance thing or something?” and then proceeded to imitate my tic.
Lol, a dominance thing! That’s probably one of the most obscure things a person has thought my tics to be. Sure, I get people who think I am cold, or sneezing, or have a cold, or am just nervous, but I’ve never really had someone ask me if I had some type of dominance complex before. Lol, I didn’t want him thinking I was that weird.
I think having Tourette is much better than having a dominance complex that causes you to hit yourself in the chest. So I just gave in and told him that it was a tic and that I have Tourette. His response to this was, “Oh,” and then he changed the subject. Lol, I think he felt bad.
haha, i dont mean to make fun, but this sounds like the title of a big bang theory show! im not sure ive ever heard of a dominant complex b4?
Yikes. Not that bad, apparently. Probably doesn’t know wth tics or TS is. Probably thought you were talking about a bug stuck to your chest and was weirded out that you were trying to kill it by smashing it. Nothing less than profuse apology would have been appropriate if he understood what you were saying, IMO.