The Incredible Vibrating Teen
Where I once saw my tics as an affliction, I now see them as mostly an annoyance.
AndreyPopov | Canva I hunched over the bathroom sink, peering at the green pill capsule held between my thumb and forefinger. It didn’t look so bad. It was bigger than I’d have liked — smaller than a Baha Men HitClip, but large enough to form a noticeable lump in the back pocket of my bedazzled Buckle boot-cut jeans, which my mom had bought on the condition that I’d never wear them while eating, drinking, or scaling a chain-link fence. The capsule was smooth and shiny, seemingly slick enough to slither past my esophagus with minimal trauma.
I glanced up at myself in the mirror and blinked my eyes three times, hard. That wasn’t enough, so I blinked them three more times. “Not enough!” screeched my relentless prefrontal cortex, so I blinked two more times, jerked my neck hard to the left, and clenched my right big toe for five seconds. Temporarily satisfied, my prefrontal cortex gave its approval: “Go ahead.” I popped the pill into my mouth, chased it with a mouthful of water from a waxy Dixie rinse cup, and tried to swallow. The pill bounced off my tensed tongue and clanged against the back of my throat, Liberty Bell–style, forcing me to upchuck the mouthful of water and the pill into the sink with a hearty CACK.
I steeled myself for another go, pausing momentarily to raise my eyebrows skyward for roughly thirty seconds until they felt correct. This time, I placed the pill all the way on the back of my tongue before reaching for the Dixie cup. But the pill rolled into the center of my gag zone, and I CACKed it up along with the remnants of a saltine cracker stored in my permanent retainer. “Idiot!” cackled my prefrontal cortex. “You’re fifteen years old, and you can’t swallow pills! Now, twirl your fingers over and over again for six minutes or your parents will die.”
I had mostly gotten away with the pill aversion until this moment. I relied on bubble gum–flavored amoxicillin syrup to cure my annual bouts of strep throat and skipped ibuprofen in favor of sickly-sweet liquid Motrin for period cramps. But there are very few drugs to help teens control their compulsive motor tics, and none of them come in sour gummy form.
I was left with two choices: learn to swallow the pills, or continue navigating my fraught teen years with my very visible condition, which had been misdiagnosed by a stern pediatric neurologist earlier that day.
“It’s Tourette’s,” the pediatric neurologist sighed as I hunched awkwardly over a plastic table covered with sensory toys. It wasn’t Tourette’s, but the doctor clearly hated teens and wanted me out of his office so he could focus on prescribing antipsychotics to hyperactive six-year-olds. He made his diagnosis entirely based on my motor tics — rolling and blinking my eyes, wiggling my nose from side to side, tormenting myself with a complex series of finger and toe movements.
If he had taken the time to examine me carefully, he’d have noticed the giant blinking sign across my forehead that spelled out obsessive-compulsive disorder.
For one thing, my tics weren’t consistent with a Tourette’s diagnosis. Most Tourette’s cases peak around the age of ten; my tics peaked midway through high school, just as I was learning to grind to the Ying Yang Twins. I also didn’t have any vocal tics, save the occasional bout of obsessive throat-clearing, which was fueled not by a neurological urge but by a fear of spontaneous anaphylactic shock. (If I can clear my throat, it’s probably not swelling shut, I thought as I coughed out a series of rhythmic ahems to the cadence of “Groove Is in the Heart.”)
Most importantly, my tics coincided with a crushing list of fears, rituals, and intrusive imaginings that ranged from stabbing my beloved pet with a knitting needle to leaping up in biology class to gyrate into my hot teacher’s crotch. My OCD was textbook; still, the neurologist was a busy man. He took one look at my twitching shoulders, adjusted his framed diploma, and sent me tumbling out of his office with a lazy diagnosis and a one-way ticket to Pharmaceutical Nation.
This left me with the pills. I’m not sure why I had such a hard time swallowing pills, though I’m sure it had something to do with my intensifying catastrophic thoughts.
What if I tried to swallow a pill and it slid into my lung, burying itself in a lymph node? What if I was allergic to the pill casing — not the medicine, the casing — and my throat swelled shut before anyone knew what was wrong with me? (Cue another frantic series of rhythmic ahems to the cadence of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service.”) What if I choked on the pill in a public setting and my crush had to stick his finger down my throat, causing me to blow chunks all over his Weird Al messenger bag? I’d be forced to drop out of school.
Photo: fizkes / Shutterstock
Any of those possibilities were better than the situation at hand. On good days, I twitched gently. On bad days, my tics sent me herky-jerking around like a cartoon cat electrocuted on a lightning rod. My body never felt right, and I spent every waking minute contorting it in freaky directions to satisfy my shrewish prefrontal cortex. Neck to the left. Harder. Shoulder blade jerked to the right, then tensed for twelve seconds. Harder.
Tics aren’t like other OCD symptoms. They’re not rituals, per se; they’re more like a physical manifestation of one’s obsessions. Think of the most horrible itch you can imagine; now, imagine being compelled to scratch it over and over again until it hurts. Why? I have no idea, and I certainly didn’t receive any insight from the doctor.
All I knew was that the tics got worse when I felt anxious, which was always.
They peaked at bedtime and kept me up for hours, resulting in corpse-like under-eye circles and the kind of exhaustion that left me snoring during an extra-credit screening of The Motorcycle Diaries. That was the true tragedy — not the physical pain and fatigue I felt from flailing nonstop, but the fact that I was too distracted to absorb Che Guevara’s appeal into my humid pubescent aura.
At first, the tics were easy to hide. A finger twirl here; a nose twitch there. For a while, I was able to disguise the latter as a quirky nod to 1960s pop culture. “Bewitched!” cried my gleeful drama teacher as I wiggled my nose covertly. I glanced up. “What?” I asked, holding my hand over my nose to conceal another wiggle. “You’re doing Bewitched! Like Elizabeth Montgomery! So cute!” she crowed.
“Uh, yeah,” I stuttered, totally clueless. “I love Bewitched.”
But left untreated, my OCD turned into ultra-sticky fly paper, snagging everything in my path and turning everyday movements into mandatory tic sequences that must be repeated just so. I’d lean down to pick a pencil up off the floor, slightly extending my neck in the process. My brain would then latch on to that slight neck extension, forcing me to repeat the movement until I felt right again. I’d twirl my pinky finger a certain way while tying my shoe; I’d then feel compelled to twirl it again and again in the exact same way until my joints click-clacked like Japanese beetles.
Think of my brain’s tic sector as a lazy torturer. Instead of devising twisted torture methods, the torturer simply waits for the torturee to contort themself into some uncomfortable position. “Did that suck?” the torturer asks. “Yes? Great. Do it again and again and again.”
Some of the tics were short-lived, minor compulsions satisfied within a matter of hours or days. But some produced such a rich sensation that they’ve stayed with me to this day, like the shoulder-rolling tic that I developed after a swim team group stretch session. The shoulder roll still plagues me, cropping up a few times an hour on a good day. I can remember exactly how it started. My teammates and I were warming up with arm circles, and I rotated my right shoulder blade sharply behind me and tensed my neck to lean into the stretch.
My prefrontal cortex went nuts. “YES, GOD, YES,” my brain screamed — so I repeated the movement. “NO, NOT LIKE THAT,” my brain screamed, so I repeated the movement harder and faster until it felt right. I felt relief, but only for a moment.
The shoulder roll is my most visible tic to date. Unlike my charming nose wiggle, the shoulder roll is a sweeping motion, often accompanied by the pop-pop-pop of my tight back muscles. “Um, Lillian?” Lauren Veldez whispered one day, leaning forward midway through a sophomore biology lecture. “Are you okay? Something insane is happening with your back.” I spun around and looked her dead in the eye. “I HAVE a CONDITION,” I sniffed. I then asked to go to the bathroom so I could spend five minutes shimmying my shoulders in peace.
Lauren wasn’t the only classmate to notice my near-constant writhing. The tics threatened my budding performance career as a passionate, though only passably talented, member of my school’s drama club and debate team. Can you imagine staying in character as a citizen of Nool in Seussical the Musical when you can’t stop blinking? Can you fathom the horror of compulsive finger-twirling and neck-jerking during an extemporaneous speaking event at a debate tournament in Neosho, Missouri? Yelling at your peers about Julian Assange is humiliating enough without the added burden of obsessive lip-licking.
Though the tics were, and are, physically uncomfortable, their sheer visibility was what landed me in the neurologist’s office.
I remember riding home from a debate tournament in the passenger seat of my dad’s sedan, weeping into my hands as I kicked off my tasteful JCPenney pumps. A judge had remarked that my nose-twitching was “distracting” and knocked me a point on my scoring sheet, recommending that I practice my speaking skills in the mirror.
“NO ONE knows how this feels,” I sobbed in supreme teenager fashion. “Everyone is STARING AT ME.” My dad told me to buck up, at which point I shrilly yelled out my plans to get a huge tattoo that spelled out “I am not my affliction” in thick medieval script the moment I turned eighteen.
“You are not afflicted,” my dad groaned, shaking his head as I stamped my feet into the dashboard. He reminded me that it could be much worse — I could have motor tics and a really huge mole.
Weeks after my neurological misdiagnosis, I still couldn’t swallow the pills. I tried sticking my tongue out like a Juggalo and squeezing my eyes shut; I tried staring at myself in the mirror and hyping myself up, Remember the Titans–style. Nothing worked. I was afflicted for life, it seemed. I pictured myself at eighty, twitching my way into a nursing home somehow already populated with my snottiest high school classmates. The thought made me despondent; the despondency made me depressed. I was physically sore from the tics, tired from the lack of sleep, and scared of my own teenage emotions.
My desperation was such that I resorted to truly craven behavior: sprinkling the contents of my pill capsules over my daily PB&J sandwich. In my mind, this was convenient, as I was supposed to take the pills with lunch. I emptied the capsules into a small plastic bag before school and packed the bag in my lunchbox. This accomplished two things: First, it ensured that I’d be able to consume the pills’ contents without actually swallowing the pills; second, it made it look like I was packing crank in my insulated lunch box, which was really cool.
Earlier that year, a boy with two first names and flippy bangs got caught smuggling a thermos full of booze into Mrs. Bruce’s English class. It’s not like he was subtle about it. “Wanna know what’s in this thermos?” he asked, eyebrows wiggling. He cracked it open. “Pure vodka. Stolich-NAYA, baby,” he said, taking an impish swig. Mrs. Bruce walked into the room ready to bust him, but it didn’t matter. He had cemented himself in Cool Dude history alongside the kid who ordered a pizza to geometry class and the girl who flashed her nipple at the back-to-school dance. I wanted a piece of that glory.
I made a huge show of extracting the bag of mysterious powder from my lunch box and dumping it onto my PB&J. Pete Langston looked pointedly at the powder. “What is that?” he asked, arms folded. I shot him a wild look. “Pete, this is CRACK,” I declared, unclear on the physical properties of actual crack cocaine. Pete said nothing, and I took a huge bite of the sandwich. I quickly realized that the powder inside pill capsules is the worst-tasting thing on earth. I gagged, sputtered, chucked the sandwich into the trash, and sprinted to the vending machine to purchase a bag of Salsitas to hold me over until after school.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is not high-octane perfectionism, despite what some smugly organized folk may tell you.
All Container Store rewards club members are perfectionists, but only a handful of them are bona fide OCD cases. I’m both, but I don’t think either trait has anything to do with the other. Yes, I arrange my dry goods in stackable jars and plan my meals using color-coded spreadsheets, but I don’t do those things because I must — I do them because I want to. Meanwhile, I twitch my shoulders and jerk my neck because I must, even though I really, really don’t want to. My tidy preferences are not the result of compulsion; I could, ostensibly, leave my spice jars unalphabetized without feeling a wave of red-hot panic. It’d be annoying, and it might even make me anxious, but I am ultimately the master of my spice jars.
While I may be the master of my spice jars, I am most definitely not the master of my body. I cannot, and probably never will, resist the pull to complete my tic sequences. I can hold them off for a bit, gritting my teeth as I fight against the urge to correct myself. But eventually, I must twitch the shoulder. I must twirl the fingers. I must tense the calf muscle until it cramps and sends me flopping in pain like a halibut out of water. My limbs hang on fine-spun threads; at any moment, my misfiring puppet master of a brain can jerk me around. Sometimes, I think about what would happen if I became paralyzed from the neck down. Would my body still find a way to carry out the tics? Or would I lose my mind completely, burning alive with the agony of unrequited compulsion?
The pills corrected none of this, even after I learned to choke them down. The neurologist started by prescribing me risperidone, an antipsychotic used to control tics in Tourette’s patients. Risperidone's side effects are numerous and fearsome, ranging from muscle stiffness and confusion to uncontrollable facial movements and painful, long-lasting erections. I experienced neither erection nor tic relief. Instead, I grew angry and taciturn, unable to pay attention in class or control the mood swings that already racked my teenage brain.
After a few months of living with Beelzebub herself, my parents took me off the risperidone and switched me to a milder cocktail: Zoloft (the doctor reasoned it would chill me out, thus calming my tics) and Topamax, an anti-epileptic drug affectionately called “Dopamax” for its head-fuzzying effects. The combination quieted my tics, but it also flatlined my energy levels in a way that made it impossible to navigate the already labyrinthine rules of teenage engagement.
I thought I was used to fatigue after the tics kept me up night after night, but that was nothing compared to the bone-deep exhaustion I felt on the drugs.
I began to lose entire stretches of time. I’d blink and be unable to account for the last two hours, though my body had somehow found its way from one point to another. It was all I could do to make it to 2:55 p.m., when I’d creep bleary-eyed into the passenger seat of my mom’s SUV, drift off with my cheek against the cool window, then crawl into bed to nap until dinnertime.
This left no time for homework; worse, it left no time for my revolving door of cretin boyfriends. I excelled at attracting them during the day, prying my bloodshot eyes open as I pranced from class to class. But come late afternoon, my meager energy supply ran out and left me crumpled corpse-like on the floor, bereft of personality and unable to do anything but stare at the ceiling.
Photo: Antonio Guillem / Shutterstock
I found myself weeping quietly as one beau looked at the floor and ended our two-month relationship in search of someone “more on my level, energy-wise.” I couldn’t blame him. Every time I executed my sparkling performance of a daytime personality, it was to disguise the fact that my brain was a black, velvety expanse suited only for the deep sleep of the pharmaceutically compromised.
In some ways, my catatonia was lush. I drifted between sleep, eyes unfocused and fists softly clenching and unclenching. It certainly blunted the Pythagorean torment of Mrs. Franklin’s trigonometry class. But I, a lifelong teacher’s pet, suddenly couldn’t retain the most basic academic principles. This was a problem at my fiercely competitive high school, where the prom king sported a rolling backpack and early admission to Caltech.
My chemically induced despondency also went directly against my life’s mission: to be everything to everyone, all the time.
The tics peaked along with the need to ensure that I was equally palatable to family members, friends, boyfriends, and teachers. The pills made me too sleepy for any of that, which worried me. If I couldn’t organize food drives and star in school plays and lead the swim team to victory and direct the Student Council with the fervor of a military mastermind, why try at anything? If I didn’t have the energy to commandeer the school PA system and deliver the afternoon announcements with the zeal of a Branson auctioneer, what was the point?
My only hope was using my scant bursts of energy to fake it — first, by charming my teachers and convincing them to give me extra time on assignments; second, by dipping my toe into every single social circle in what may be modern history’s most ambitious performance of adolescent normalcy. The proof’s in my high school yearbook. Flip to the back and you’ll find black-and-white photos of every student organization, smiling members all arranged by height. I’m in most of these photos.
On one page, I’m peeking sheepishly out of a crowd of Key Club members. On the next page, I’m leaning against two of my fellow Peer Mediators, arms crossed in a show of grand solidarity. Keep flipping and you’ll see me among the Drama Club, the Debate Team, the Student Council, and a small coalition of students dedicated to internet neutrality. In all these photos, I’m smiling eagerly among my peers, standing somewhere near the middle in a worn-out crewneck sweatshirt. But look closely and you’ll see that I’m pulled taut. There’s a harsh smile stretched across my face, and my eyebrows are raised frantically in a way that causes deep ridges to form across my forehead. It’s the face of someone who is too tired to stand up but still feels compelled to perform excellence in every way possible.
Eventually, I figured out my dosage. After college, a savvy psychiatrist took one look at me and scoffed at my Tourette’s diagnosis, weaning me off both the Zoloft and the Topamax and replacing them with a single anti-anxiety drug that did more for my affliction than any of the drugs that had slithered through my veins throughout adolescence.
I still can’t account for the large swaths of time I lost to those drugs. It’s as though some government worker has gone through and redacted sections of my teenage memories, replacing them with inky black spots I’ll never be able to clear. I’m left with vague high school–shaped memories. Even without the benefit of mind-addling pharmaceuticals, most adults look back on their adolescence with a deep, guttural cringe. I look back on mine with a level of distrust typically reserved for alcoholic brownouts.
I remember some things. I remember driving to a nearby farm town for a football game and running over an opossum in my Nissan Maxima. I couldn’t stand to leave it wriggling on the asphalt, so I stopped the car with a lurch and backed over it, then drove away with a bloodcurdling, squicked-out scream. I remember the smell of the Drama Club costume closet, where I very nearly slapped a bossy girl named after an apple. I remember rolling up my sweatshirt, painting my stomach for a football game, and spending the first quarter clenching my abs so tightly that I got lightheaded and had to leave early. I remember the mother of one particular paramour; she accused me of having a menstrual disorder after I yelled at her perverted son. I remember eating waffles with my best friend on the morning of graduation, nervously stacking Smucker's jelly packets, and worrying about what came next.
Everything else is anyone’s guess. I might as well have spent four years in a blindfold, stumbling down my high school’s stairwells and interacting with other clumsy teens in total darkness. I hope I was generally agreeable, though there’s a good chance that the pills addled me beyond the point of sociability.
Where I once saw my tics as an affliction, I now see them as mostly an annoyance.
This isn’t a tale of radical self-acceptance; my tics are often frustrating, sometimes painful, and generally inconvenient. If I were a healthier, more productive person, I’d take this moment to reflect on what my tics have taught me. If I were a TikToker, I’d cast myself as some sort of neurodivergent superhero. “My tics might be annoying sometimes,” I’d say, latching onto a deeply unflattering viral dance. “But I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
I am neither a productive person nor a TikToker nor am I especially comfortable with the neurodivergent label. Where does that leave me? Existing in ambiguity, I guess.
I’ll have to find peace in the fact that most of my adolescence is hidden under an inkblot. I suppose I could go trawling through social media, looking for archaeological clues as to my behavior in 2009. Honestly, I’d rather not dredge up years’ worth of cringe-inducing “rawr xD” wall postings. Maybe my bad memory is a good thing. Maybe it’s a protective measure to keep me from dwelling on the general humiliation of the late aughts. Maybe it’s an attempt to pull myself up by my pharmaceutically lubricated bootstraps and dismiss the very real pain of a neurological diagnosis at fifteen.
Most likely, it’s an ongoing exercise in manufactured peace, in leaning into the discomfort of not knowing. More than once, I’ve assured myself that my high school classmates were far too busy picking PB&J crumbs out of their teeth to pay attention to my odd flailing. I repeat the mantra of self-conscious women everywhere: Everyone is too focused on their own weirdness to worry about yours. No one remembers your embarrassing moments. Then I remember the time a classmate broke his leg during a faculty basketball game. The school nurse hauled him away, weeping in a wheelchair. The student body broke into spontaneous applause. The vice principal screamed into a bullhorn: “GO BULLDOGS!” I will remember that day until the sun dies.
It stands to reason, then, that someone remembers my own high school strangeness. Maybe former classmates remember me as pharmaceutically compromised; maybe they just remember me as annoying. Maybe I’ve frightened a stranger on an airplane, seated three rows behind me with a perfect view of my herky-jerky shoulder. Maybe I’ve frightened a stranger on an airplane for a reason entirely unrelated to my perennial flailing. Maybe I should just shut up and take my pills.
Lillian Stone is a reporter and humor writer living in Chicago, where she writes for outlets like Slate, GQ, The New Yorker, and The Onion. This essay is an excerpt from her fifirst book, Everybody's Favorite, available wherever books are sold.