Introducing Eva

Posted Wed 25th Sep 2024 at 09:15
by Sally Hirst

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My magical tics and her mischievous personality

Hello, I’m Sally and I’m a 24 year old artist with Tourette’s. I like to call my Tourette’s Eva because she has her own mischievous personality…

You see she’s very honest, but not always the ‘good’ kind of honest, she can be too honest at times. She is also very cheeky too but can be quite shy around new people although she is starting to get more confident. She likes dancing, ventriloquy and baking. She doesn’t like the wind, feeling tired, bullies, and busses.  She hopes to be a critic one day which I think she’ll be very good at.

Maybe I should write a book about her some day?

I sometimes wonder if Eva is magical. I kept having dairy based tics like ‘yogurt’ ‘chocolate’ ‘cheese’ and ‘cream’. Anyway, after many years of tummy troubles I decided to try a lactose free diet for a while to see if that made any difference whatsoever and it did, but I also noticed Eva (my Tourette’s) suddenly stopped with the dairy based tics. I still have tics but not dairy based ones anymore. It was like she was trying to warn me or something.

I’ve also been doing art therapy because I was feeling a bit sad recently. Anyway I noticed Eva is already doing what my therapist is advising me to do without me realising it.

My therapist noticed I’ve been blocking and hiding my true feelings and emotions. So she basically sent me a task to allow myself to feel all the feelings especially the negative ones, however small or silly I think they are. This task would’ve been very difficult to follow, if not impossible, without Eva, my Tourette’s. Eva made sure I let the whole world know if I’m a little unhappy by having a full-blown tic attack.

It’s like that time I saw the bus I needed drive past, so I missed the bus. I was only a tiny bit frustrated because even though I was still going to be very early anyway it would be about a 20-minute wait for the next bus. I tried to hide that frustration feeling because I thought it was silly, but Eva disagreed and was ticcing to the left, ticcing to the right and making lots of loud and silly noises too. So I stopped, noticed my emotion and allowed my body to feel it. It felt good!

Thank you for reading about my experience with Eva.

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