Thank you for ignoring me

Strangers ignoring my tics from Tourette Syndrome is a kind of grace, and I'm grateful.

I am barking on a crowded bus—not quite like a dog—but it has an animal quality. Three loud, staccato yelps elicit puzzled body language from my fellow transit-mates. Some shift uncomfortably, others avert their gaze. Most, thankfully, ignore my emission completely. I’ve transgressed. The response is deep silence, bordering on shunning (if it weren’t so laced with apathy). The apathy is a gift—I’m not resentful of it—I relish in it, basking; it’s as comforting to me as a warm blanket right out of the dryer. The kindest reaction to my tics is to ignore them.

I have Tourette Syndrome (TS), but not the kind with cursing. Coprolalia, the specific type of tic which causes involuntary outbursts of derogatory words and remarks, is only present in 10% of Tourette sufferers—yet it's the symptom that has most captured the popular imagination and dominates the disorder’s representation in the media, often as the butt of ill-informed jokes. Most people think our malady consists of involuntarily screaming the F-word at inopportune times, and while this is the case for some of us, it is not the case for the majority of us. (Personally, when I scream the F-word, it’s always on purpose.) My tics are often as benign and unassuming as rapid blinking or flinging my hand from a fist into an open palm. The louder eruptions—the clamorous “DA” sounds—are the most extreme incarnations of my verbal tics and they usually visit me among strangers, in transit, in the liminal space between here and there.

Even though I haven’t shouted obscenities or slurs into the crowd, my noise-making has nonetheless shattered the social compact of public transportation: the tacit agreement that we’ll all leave each other alone due to our darkly shared understanding that any one of us—wildcards all—might be capable of murder, theft, or worse. Best not to risk it. With the exception of occasional conversation between people who are traveling together and sometimes music blasting out of headphones, silence is mostly agreed upon for the good of the collective. And here I’ve gone and pierced through it with an awkward smattering of “DA, DA, DA”s yelled in close quarters, in rapid succession.

Wanting to blend with the herd, I also act like the outburst hasn’t happened. Once upon a time, I used to make an apologetic face or strike a slumped, self-deprecating pose to telegraph guilt—and to reassure my fellow passengers that I’m not one of the murderers, thieves, or drunks we altogether try to avoid. But now I just do nothing. It feels cozy and communal to be part of the pretending. Together, we’re constructing the illusion that nothing has occurred; it’s a collaboration. We’re basically teammates now.

Many minutes pass. Just as we’re all nestled into a comfortable state and the jarring disturbance from my mouth has almost faded out of memory, and right as my mind begins to wander away from concentrating very hard on not ticcing again, another lacerating trio springs forth from my vocal cords—“DA, DA, DA”—rupturing the quaint little quietude we’d all tucked ourselves into. Now I’m nervous. Will this be the time someone says something rude, confronts me, hurls an insult at me? Will one of these strangers dismantle the fun delusion we’ve all been participating in, the game of: “let’s pretend some possibly deranged lady isn’t screaming on the bus?” No, again. (And, knock on wood, no one ever has, likely due to a combination of luck and privilege.)

Some move around in their seats or look away, but the loop restarts. Communicating telepathically, we all instantly agree to prolong the make-believe, to continue to contrive the alternate reality in which I didn’t just yell a bunch of cacophonous nonsense sounds at brute volume. What a blessing. I am so grateful, truly.

I’ve come to interpret people ignoring my tics as an act of grace, extended charitably. It’s a cherished benevolence that I don’t take for granted. Letting me blend in, allowing my unruly eruptions to be subsumed by the bus sounds, and city babel, and the pulsing inner worlds of everyone else—their thoughts, their internal monologues, their worries and concerns taking immediate precedence in their minds over whatever sound I may have made—it’s such a balm to feel so unimportant, and un-intrusive, and forgotten. To disappear. What a delight. Even if the ignoring is coming from a jaded place, not a place of grace—perhaps stemming from the reality that as city-dwellers we’ve all observed marvels much more wild than a woman yelling on the bus, and my boutade really isn’t that interesting by comparison—I savor the feeling all the same.

As someone who, even outside of my TS, has always been self-conscious about the nuisance and volume of my output (having been shushed by adults and teachers throughout adolescence), the scale of my emotive personality, and how much space I take up with my voice and body, it is a relief to be utterly disregarded even when I am doing something that infringes so completely on social norms such as yelping at top-volume on a city bus. In this case, silence is kindness. (In other instances of course, silence can do harm—when people don’t speak up to interrupt racism, sexism, or public abuse, for example.)

There’s an intimacy to the whole scene, too. The strangers on the bus are witnessing something some of my friends and acquaintances haven’t even seen. The disorder manifests in different ways for different people but my TS generally does not act up when I’m focusing intently on something or when I’m deeply engaged in conversation. For that reason, my boss has never seen me tic, nor have scores of other people who are known to me.

Or rather, they’re not aware they’ve seen my tics. I’ve mastered the art of playing down or passing off my eye-blinking and hand-flinging so that most people don’t know that a motor tic has occurred at all. And I’ve learned to perform what is called a “competing response” to prevent me from immediately repeating a tic—so I can usually ward off, say, additional eye-blinking tics after the first series, ensuring that my friends or boss remain none the wiser.

Even when I was in cognitive behavioral therapy for my co-morbid OCD and TS, my therapist didn’t see me do a big, eruptive verbal tic until months into treatment; I was so engaged and focused on our sessions, that few tics squeaked through at first. (An interesting topic for another day is the etiological link between Tourette Syndrome and OCD—another deeply misunderstood condition. Up to 60% of people with Tourette’s also have OCD and the symptoms can overlap so seamlessly it can become hard to differentiate between what is a compulsion and what is a tic.)

Those who have spent a lot of time with me—my colleagues, family, and close friends—have inevitably seen my tics countless times. And they’ve all, lovingly, learned to ignore them. Sometimes my husband asks, “was that a tic?” when I say or make a new or strange utterance, just to check, but other than that, he knows the drill: Keep it moving.

It’s sometimes weird to me that the people who have experienced my most explosive verbal tics are an elite group composed of extremes—complete strangers and the small circle of people dearest and closest to me. Miraculously, the people who know me best and the people who don’t know me at all react in the exact same way: with silence. To me, it’s an act of care. And I appreciate it deeply. And while it means so much from those who are beloved to me, it holds an unequal—but still significant—weight coming from the strangers with whom I share this swath of urban landscape. Strangers don’t have to be nice or to extend grace; they might never see me again. But they choose to ignore me. And for that, I give thanks.