Sasquatch to the Moon

12: Twist and Shout

ROCKET

The plane is dark. Redeye style. Tampa to Regina, no stops. I should be sleeping but I just can't, I'm fidgety. It feels like my muscles are itchy but I know it's just the RLS from my ADHD. I'm shifting my legs as often as I feel is socially acceptable, but I have an un-killable urge to get up and walk up and down the aisle to get them to stop feeling as restless. If I don't move for too long, my thighs start twitching and pulling involuntarily. 

I know if I don't manage to fix this or distract myself, I'm going to have a fit. I don't want to end up getting really bad on a plane. My brain is telling me to go go go go go go go go go but I'm stuck buckled into a seat with an entire dark plane full of people that DEFINITELY don't need me walking up and down the aisles and moving around because I'm struggling to keep myself still. 

I definitely don't want to have a fit. It starts with the twitching and then I get a couple of specific tics, my shoulders jump, my face starts to twitch, eventually, if I can't get up and drain the pent up energy, I have to start talking to myself like I'm crazy. It starts to feel like I'm going to explode and I need to vent off some of the pressure somehow. 

Fuck it. 

I unclip and stand up, putting my hands on my head and starting a short walk to the back of the plane, stepping over stray legs here and there from people that are definitely asleep and don't need me stepping on them. I pace back toward the front of the plane, taking deep and slow breaths, trying to get that feeling of go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go to stop. It's working, somewhat, as I pace back to the front for a third time. 

Then the other part of the ADHD kicks in and I stop paying attention, which leads me to accidentally kicking Jorgen's leg. 

One of his eyes flies open, staring up at me.

"Sorry," I keep my voice as low as I can. "ADHD." .

He nods, closing his eye again. "Yeah, your involuntary motion was bad today." 

Does he fucking catalog everything? Jeez, dude. Next thing I know he's going to be keeping track of all of our blood oxygen levels. 

Plus, I don't really have noticeable involuntary motions like Jorgen says. Mom divides them into 'tics' and 'stims.' She's got a Czech Psychology degree that has a certificate that doesn't transfer to Canada, but I trust her on this kinda stuff. She's the one that finally, after literal years of it being ignored by school teachers and the people that normally catch it, brought me in to the doctors to get diagnosed with ADHD, though I'm fairly certain it was obvious to most people who knew me at the time. From what she's told me about all of it, I've got it bad. I developed tics and more stims than a normal person. I don't tic a lot, only when I'm absolutely exhausted or ridiculously overwhelmed, sometimes if I get drunk too; it was worse when I was little, but I still get a head-jerk and a nose-scrunch and an eye twitch when I'm in those kind of situations. 

On the other hand, the stimming is something that most people, if not all, have. Everyone I've met fidgets when they're nervous or wiggles a little when they're excited. I just get it more often. I'll put my hands in my hair or rub my opposite shoulder, sometimes I'll rub my fingers together like some sort of hand-grasshopper and then there's the leg shaking and regular hand fidgeting. When I was little I developed a couple slightly self-destructive stims, biting the insides of my cheeks until I forced myself to stop because I was wearing away the skin to blood, and picking at the skin on my thumbs being another one. As I got older I learned to redirect those into less damaging things. Suppressing the itch to stim can get incredibly uncomfortable, that's where people start to call it fake. If I can voluntarily force myself to stop shaking my leg or rubbing my fingers down the outside seam of my pants, according to people that don't get urges like that, it means I'm just making it up. The problem, however, is that if I force myself to stop, I get uncomfortable and feel all gross and restless. Yes, I can stop, but it kinda sucks.