Caught inside

I think I am destroying my eye sight. I have this tic. I unfocus my eyes for a second or two. I am not even sure how I do it. I have looked in the mirror while doing it and I don't appear to be crossing my eyes or anything.

I have been doing this for years. I did it when I was a child. It was never leading the pack of tics, though. There are usually one or two tics that seem to take priority over the rest for a period of time. A few days, weeks or months. And for whatever reason a new tic or tics will take the lead when it is their turn.

My point, here is that this eye business has been my tic of choice lately. Not only does it give me headaches but I think it is ruining my vision. I feel like I need a new prescription for my contacts all of the sudden. This must be a direct result of this horrible tic. By the way, wearing contacts is a great way to excuse yourself in public when banging out some eye tics for all to see. "Are you OK?" "Oh yeah. It's just my contacts."

Once, when I was in college, this girl caught me in the middle of a series of eye tics. She said, "Do you wear contacts?" Half way through her sentence the inflection in her voice changed dramatically. This was probably just around the split second when she realized I could not be wearing contacts because my face was in fact bespectacled. This was before I ditched the glasses and switched to the more intimate version of vision correction I wear to this day.

I am unfocusing my eyes as I am typing this. This tic sucks. It really does. I hate them all; don't get me wrong. But within that madness I do have my favorites. And believe me, this is not on that list. I would much rather be making tight fists or jerking my jaw all over the place or tilting my head back as far as possible so as to feel that painful stretch on my throat. Ahh, what a feeling that painful stretch is. Good stuff.

I have always worried about long term effects of my many tics. Arthritis, dis alignment of my jaw, backaches, etc...

I saw a chiropractor once. He did an x-ray. He mad a comment about how the bottom of my spine looks crooked or weird or some such word that aroused curiosity in me when hearing it being used to describe my spine. But he got distracted by something else and then seemed to forget about it. Of course, I could have and should have reminded him but I chose to ignore it out of fear. As a kid I had some tics that wreaked havoc on my lower back. I have always feared they did some damage. And this "Dr." or rather a guy with and X-ray machine noticed something a little off. He confirmed my fears but I don't know to what degree. Yes, because I ignored it.

So, here I am. Perhaps right in the middle of a long term effect. It's a difficult position to word. When you are in the middle of something, I mean. It's after the anticipation of something and before the looking back at it. Right after the September 11 attacks during a conversation with a good friend of mine I expressed how weird I felt. And that I did not know how to describe the feeling. His reply made all the sense in the world. He said, "We're in history."

The sentence itself makes no sense. But it makes lots of sense, too. How can we be experiencing history in the present tense, right?

And, now I am in the middle of something that is happening to me. A result of my own self destructive nature. And my self destruction is beyond my control. Now, that sentence makes no sense! But, yet.

It makes perfect sense all the same. If you're a touretter, anyway.