Split

Mia, she/her

The tics are strange.

Some days they never happen, other days I'm bombarded with them every other hour or so.

I have one where my neck kind of tilts and turns.

When I was little I thought it was just shivers, I'd get weird stares from people at school and even my own family whenever I'd do it, I just thought I looked funny.

Now, as I've gotten older, I've realized it's not a shiver

It's like a sneeze build-up, but up my spine and on the back of my neck. It's a strange feeling.

I have another one where I hit the nearest thing.

If there's nothing around, I hit me.

I'll feel the muscle in my right arm tense up a little and then something in my body says "do it" and I hit. Sometimes it's my computer, sometimes it's a table, sometimes it's my brother. Or sometimes it's me.

Usually the hitting one is triggered by movement, either by me or something else, whereas the simple head-tilting one is often by sound.

If you're wondering where the tics are from, I couldn't tell you.

When I was fourteen, my little brother had a panic attack I was terrified, and I asked my mom if he was okay. 

She said he was fine, continued to force him to do what was causing the panic itself.

I told her that maybe he had a panic disorder, or anxiety.

"He's fine." She said, "We don't want to put any labels on it."

My mom's died by suicide in 1991, and I think she's afraid that if she tells her child he has anxiety, he'll believe it.

He'll believe it so hard, he'll go insane. He'll be afraid of everything.

From that point on, my brain told me never to tell her anything about my health, mental or physical.

I burnt my arm once so bad I needed stitches. I iced and bandaged it.

I lived through serious depression. I smiled and stayed away from her.

I had insomnia. I sucked it up and drank coffee and tea.

I had an eating disorder. I told her I wasn't hungry for breakfast.

I strained my ankle. I shut up and ran through it.

But most of all, I have tics and possible ADHD. I don't tell her a thing.

Even if she knew, even if she saw it, she'd just sigh and blame it on anything else.

"You're fine."