In my (relatively short) life I have attended several forms of therapy.
My therapy journey starts at year 7 when sudden and unexplained panic attacks left me in the rooted to the spot, whimpering and convulsing until someone: A) Called my mum B) Called an ambulance. This continued for a couple of years and I even got a special pass so I could leave lessons before the crush of students at the bell. Because of my *super special hall pass* I got to chill out (have panic attacks) in a special little room where a kind member of school nursing staff would feed me tea and breakfast bars and try desperately to get me to open up. The problem was I didn't really know what was wrong. All I knew was that, as soon as you put me in a close or loud place, my whole body just went 'NOPE'. Looking back on it, I now know that sensory overload is a common symptom of Tourettes disorder, all those panic attacks were a simple reaction to the brain fog that I was born with!
So how to make a jittery 14 year old worse? Knock, knock. Who's there? It's sexual assault! Distasteful jokes aside, I don't really know how to talk to about this. No body ever teaches you how to talk about assault, I think people are scared to. My Granddad had just passed away and I was honestly just blindly fumbling through life at this point. Everything's a bit of a blur. I was assaulted by an ex boyfriend (my first proper ex) who texted me after 'That was fun! :) we should do it again sometime!' I don't know why I remember the text word for word, I just do.
And that, ladies and gents is what we call a primary trigger! (it just means the first thing that released the Tourettes) My first glorious tic (the legendary invisible ukulele). I didn't really know why I did it, I just did. My tic's fluxed in and out of my life until I hit sixth form.
The sixth form years (hold on it's going to get messy).
I started sixth form a little weird and dating this guy called Lawrence. I was okay but a little stressed. By the second year I was A LOT STRESSED! and I totally lost control. To make things worse nobody knew that it was Tourettes. Some of the hardest emotional distress I ever encountered was being frequently told to 'stop ticing' as the therapist who misdiagnosed me sent a letter to my school calling my Tourettes 'habitual tics'. (side note: habitual in this context does not mean controllable) And so my teachers were given the instruction not to tolerate the tics but to treat them as a panic attack, or nail biting habit. Needless to say this made things so much worse and when I left college i was pretty much an emotionally void husk of the bubble person I had once been.
It's not all bad though! Through out this time I had a wonderful councillor called Tracy who didn't 'fix' me as such but helped me to be okay with saying 'I'm not okay'. I still hadn't told anyone about the assault...
So I left sixth form with two half A levels, a B and a C. I think I did okay.
So then I went to a seminar at spring harvest. For those of you who don't know Spring Harvest is like a Christian festival with less drugs and more worship. Basically the main theme was: 'Don't expect people to help you if they don't know whats going on'. And so I told my mum about my assault...
Thing's get better now... I promise...
And then Butlins!! I worked at Butlins for a year. The job itself was alright but the people were ace! Working at Butlins basically gave me back a personality, I stopped hiding away, went out more and made friends, WOOH! Go me!
And then Butlins got too much. I got so caught up in living for the weekend I neglected a lot of things. And so I left Butlins.
In the months that followed I got a new job as an Activities Coordinator. It's good fun.
Then I got my own flat, I lived alone for 3 months.
Then I got super ill ( I know this is long, we're almost done!). We'll call this 'the secondary trigger'. Up until I was ill I'd developed a kind of 'emotional flat line' strategy so I could 'fake normality' most of the time But when I got ill I simply couldn't hold on top it anymore.
Then I got well!! I'm almost fixed now, minus two stents in my bile duct! and I have been diagnosed and well that's where we are now.
I live at home and am still an Activities coordinator. Now my only therapy is Mario on the wii (sad but jumping on a few turtles help!)
I'm super squeaky and who knows what my therapy journey will bring, but
for now, I think I'll stick to Mario.
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