Thursday, November 24, 2011

Thanksgiving with My Cousins: Being Relaxed about Tourette's

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! My Thanksgiving went pretty well. My dad's side of the family gets together every year for all the big holidays and especially for thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is one of our biggest family events because all the older cousins who are in college already come back into town and we pretty much stay at the party from 2:00 in the afternoon until 8:00 at night. Quite a long time to be eating and socializing with relatives. My cousin who also has Tourettes (Twitch) couldn't be there which I was kinda disappointed about, but my other two cousins who are girls my age were there.

By the way I would like to add a side note here. I don't think it's too far fetched that my cousin with TS (Twitch) may somehow one day come across this blog. She knows enough about my life to put the pieces together and figure out that this is my blog. Who knows, maybe I may even one day show it too her. For Twitch: The nickname, Twitch is meant to be endearing and cute. I  have thought about someone calling me Twitch one day as a nickname and I have to say I think I would like it as long as I knew it was coming from someone who was my friend and who understood TS. So Twitch, I hope you like the blog and if you come across it, feel free to text or e-mail me if you want to let me know what you think! P.S. even though we're not super close right now, you have helped me accept myself and my diagnosis more than anyone else. You are a huge reason that I am able to be so open about TS with the people in my life and  I really want to thank you for that.

Anyway back to the Thanksgiving story. The two cousins who are girls my age were at the party. One of them is just back from her first year in college (Lipstick), and the other is a senior in high school like me (Kitty). Kitty already knows about my TS because I told her this past summer but I wasn't sure that Lipstick knew. I'm not very close to her at all and never really had been. My tics weren't all that bad today (I'm well rested and relaxed thanks to the little break from school) and I was only doing some eye rolling and facial tics. We started talking a bit about Twitch's new dog and I was saying that Twitch had sent me pictures of him.  Lipstick was surprised by this because she never knew that Twitch and I were close and asked me if I talked much with Twitch. I quickly responded with "Oh we started talking a lot this past summer because of the whole Tourettes thing". I surprised even myself with this response. I was able to be so relaxed about telling Lipstick (someone who I had been worried about knowing for so long)! I didn't know that I was going to be able to be so casual about telling her. Although pretty much all of my dad's side of the family knows I have TS, I guess Lipstick really didn't know. She asked me if I have Tourettes, and I answered in a very relaxed way that I do. She was of course curious and asked me what my tics were and when I was diagnosed and we talked about it for a little bit. Lipstick and Kitty were both very relaxed about it as well because I was so relaxed about it and it was so nice that something that had been a huge deal in my head turned out to be a very stress-less situation. I was conformable and okay with the fact that I did some tics in front of them which was so nice! Anyway, all in all it was a very good Thanksgiving. I hope everyone else had a good thanksgiving as well!

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