The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them Read Online Free Page B

completely unconsciously or through a premonitory sensation that’s satisfied only by the tic—OCD bubbles up as conscious thoughts in the mind.
    “His certainly isn’t the worst case I’ve ever seen,” the doctor said to Mom. I wondered then what the worst case might look like.
    What Mom already knew, and I learned over time, is that most people don’t understand TS. They think of it as a “cursing disease,” a disorder that makes people swear uncontrollably. That’s how it’s usually depicted on television. It’s a trope, because it makes a great punch line. And sure, that formexists, but it’s rare—fewer than 10 percent of all diagnosed TS cases. But there are myriad possible tics. In fact, TS looks different in everyone who has it—I’ve heard it called a “fingerprint condition,” and that’s exactly right. No two people have the same case. Some people echo other people’s words. Some hoot, some cough, some hiss or bark or grunt. There are motor tics, too—in fact, it’s not TS unless a person has both vocal and motor tics—like nose wrinkling, grimacing, kicking, or even jumping. Complicating matters, even in a single person tics often change over time, too.
    So now we had a name for my urges, but not much else. There was no reliable treatment or cure. Some children did extremely well on medications; others moved from cocktail to cocktail, each one causing different side effects to little avail.
    But the doctor explained some other things, too—curious things. He said that he’d seen some examples of people with these disorders having some special gifts—an ability to hyperfocus, to stick with a task until it’s 100 percent mastered. He’d also seen a kind of hypersensitivity—an ability to see and feel and smell things that others couldn’t.
    Mom described my challenges as a baby—how sensitive I was to sights and sounds and touch, as if my whole body were one exposed nerve.
    The doctor nodded. “Sure. That fits with what I’ve seen in some patients.”
    As we walked out of the office, he said, almost as an afterthought, “Mrs. Howard?”
    She turned around.
    “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said. “And there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of: with every challenge a kid faces,there’s some flip side. I have no way to prove it, but I believe this: there’s always a flip side.”
    S oon after, my mother met with teachers and administrators at my middle school. She’d gone in armed with all the information she could find: photocopies of books she’d gotten from libraries, pamphlets she’d ordered from organizations, copies of every article she’d been able to find. These were the days before the Internet, of course; Mom had to work hard for the information she had.
    She sat in the classroom, a nurse, teachers, administrators, and the district psychologist arrayed in a semicircle around her. Not one of them picked up any of her handouts.
    One teacher even asked, “Are you sure Tim has Tourette Syndrome? Because you know, Mrs. Howard, there are so many labels these days that people use to excuse bad behavior.”
    Well shit , my mom thought. Now I’m going to have to fight these people, too.
    Before she’d gone in, she felt alone. Now she felt worse than alone; she felt outnumbered.
    She cried the whole way home.
    B ut it was true what the doctor said about an ability to hyperfocus—at least when it came to sports.
    I watched a documentary about Pelé, then spent hour upon hour in the backyard trying to master his techniques—step-overs, cut-backs, stop-and-gos. I practiced day after day, sometimes not even hearing my mom when she called me in for dinner.
    I discovered that an Italian cable television station broadcast games of AC Milan, the European Cup soccer champions.Saturdays became devoted to studying Roberto Donadoni’s artful footwork, the way the ball seemed almost Velcroed to his foot as he dribbled down the field.
    When the USA qualified for the World