As an avid comic book reader when I was a teenager, The Incredible Hulk was always one of my favorites. Ditto for the TV show in the 1980's. In each, you had Dr. Banner, this mild mannered scientist who incurred "an infection" of sorts to gamma radiation that sparked physical and behavioral transformations to his person that often led to pain, chaos, and lack of uninhibition.
To me, my Tourette's has always felt similar. There's a side of me that some, hopefully most, people see that reflects kindness, compassion, and intelligence. And yet, there is also this side of me (my Tourette's) that lacks control and breeds excess, whether in movement or behavior. It can't be contained or jailed. It yearns to be heard, felt, and felt again, and again. Like the Hulk, it's an incredible excess--an excess or cranking my neck, pushing in my knees when I walk, and wheezing when I'm all Hulking out. Chemically in my brain, even, it's an excess of dopamine.
In the TV show Dr. Banner ventures from town to town in search of his cure, and in nearly every episode, he falls madly, deeply in love with "The One!", only for both parties to come to terms that he cannot be in love due to his "Hulk-sim."
Again, the parallels are stark for me. I often communicate with women on dating apps or websites, seeking romantic companionship, but once they learn of my inner Hulk (My Tourette's), the beginnings almost always come to a "HulkSmashingly" halt. My Hulk keeps me from feeling one of life's greatest experiences.
I wish I could have been The Mighty Thor instead. At least then, I would have had some hair to shout "Oh say thee nay" about. But then again, Thor has his own problems like alien invaders, a father who sleeps all the time, and a brother that is constantly trying to kill him and rule the universe.
What is your Inner Hulk? What do you struggle to tame and control? I'd love to read your responses below.
Here is a poem from my book, Fingerprints, inspired by my Tourette's/My Hulk.
Hulk Out!
The Incredible Excess: (A Conversation with Tourette’s)
“If I felt hopeless yesterday,
and I feel even more hopeless now.
Then I must've had some hope the day before.”
I want it to stop.
The movements.
The fixations.
Excitement.
The root hurt.
My neighbors shaking my apartment when they talk.
Sometimes I wish I were green
so I could get taken in the street,
a rainy night gone kisses
while a hide-and-found girl
cribs my head like a ball,
hugging it heart to neck,
her chin on my top
as the wet pelts down on us
my ear just off her shoulder blade.
I want it to stop.
My neighbors banging up their steps.
Walls shaking.
My mouth opening to a whine
Slutting around in the fear
that I’ll never change
the changes.
The excitement.
Fixations.
Sometimes I wish I were green
not lying on this carpet, a gray for two
trying to sleep it away
dreaming that someone’s in the same room with me
taking punches to my head till I stop
the fixations.
Movements.
People are my symptoms
with that tickle in their faces
when they want to ask,
“Are you okay?”
“What are you looking at?”
My skin closing in on me
as if I’m my own disease
while the things I buy
are the side effects that are really up front with me,
but the walls are shaking.
That doesn’t change.
I want it to stop.
That happy in a foggy glass
I feel counters for,
past the picture of my empty-hole family,
me in the middle
sometimes so close
I can’t see them.
But sometimes I wish I were green
so I could walk away from it,
through the blinking hand
telling me not to walk
on who I am.
Sometimes I wish it would stop.
That it would change
or go north for a summer or two.
The neighbors.
Walls.
The broken hanger I step on
like a face wrecked in sympathy
when I’m trying to bury it in my closet
and take some me back.
The excitement.
The movements.
Fixations.
Yes. You’re guests that don’t pick up after themselves,
even the excess.
It’s all an excess of itself.
Sometimes it’s better to be thirsty in an empty glass
than to drown in an overflowing one.
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