Alien Hand Syndrome

                My body has never felt particularly compelled to act in accordance with conscious thought. This is evidenced not only by the fact that I sleep-eat, but also by my nervous twitches. So far, I have had two distinct nervous twitches. The first started in sixth grade and lasted about a year. The second began about three years ago and still graces me with its presence every few days. I would not be surprised if I end up collecting several more by the time all is said and done. My hang-ups do not seem compelled to stay confined to my mind, perpetuating obsessive thoughts like normal neuroses. Instead they flitter about, randomly taking control of my faculties and producing awkward moments.

 

                Given my adolescent social graces, the first nervous twitch was not particularly surprising.  At the time, I was wound so tight that I would tape flash cards on the ceiling in order to be able to study until the actual moment I fell asleep (I slept on the top bunk of a combination futon/bunk bed, the futon part of which was covered in marine mammal stuffed animals). I worried about most of the same things as my peers: things like why the kids on the bus were so mean to me, how I did on my last social studies project, and what would happen to the marine ecosystem near Alaska if the Cook Inlet subpopulation of Beluga whales went extinct. I just worried about them at a much more intense level.

                The Original Twitch (as it’s known since the arrival of its successor) was a combination of uncomfortable-looking gestures. I would simultaneously: squint my eyes, scrunch my nose, curl my upper lip over my braces, hunch my shoulders, and clench my hands approximately twice a minute whenever I was worked up. I didn’t even know I was doing it. Okay, now you try. 

                Nervous Twitch: the Sequel arrived in the spring of 2010. I had just started graduate school, quit drinking, and changed just about every major facet of my life. In other words, I was a basket case. The new one was much more insidious. Whereas the first twitch was very obviously a compulsive tic, the second one looks more like I’m just throwing things at people. My right hand and elbow extend simultaneously, causing me to lose my grip on whatever object I’m holding and launching it through the air. This has produced some situations involving various degrees of embarrassment, apologies and feeble attempts at explanation. 

                The first time I can remember really noticing the new twitch was at Barnes & Noble. I was buying some books and the guy at the cash register was trying to flirt with me. I started feeling flustered. I didn’t want to be flirted with- I just wanted to buy my ineffective pop psychology “anxiety cure” manuals and historical chick lit novels in peace. While I was not consciously assertive enough to verbally create those boundaries, my hand decided to do it for me by propelling my credit card at the cashier’s face. I was so embarrassed and perplexed that I said the first thing that came to mind- the only thing that came to mind:

                “Sorry I threw my credit card at you.” With that, I took my bag and sped off.

                I told my parents about this incident and the other, minor occurrences I began to notice afterward. I don’t think they really believed me until my dad experienced it for himself. I had moved into a new apartment and Dad and I were painting the walls together. It’s one of my favorite memories. Dad and me, listening to podcasts and a particularly excellent playlist I’d created for our painting party. We didn’t talk much, painting side by side in a companionable quiet. Everything was going smoothly until I turned to say something to my dad, and instead hurled my paint-filled brush at him. It hit him in the chest. My dad looked at me, aghast. I stared back at him, feeling surprised but vindicated that he could finally witness my latest motor affliction.

                “You really didn’t mean to do that?” He asked after a long pause. I shook my head. I could tell he was struggling to believe me.

                “Because it looked like you meant to throw it at me.” 

                We were in the process of listening to some Discovery Channel Stuff You Should Know podcasts, and it seemed that the next couple episodes directly related to the twitch. The first was about Alien Hand Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which a person’s hand acts involuntarily. Symptoms may include picking up an object and attempting to use it without conscious directive from the brain, spontaneously trying to perform simple tasks like buttoning a shirt, or uncontrolled reaching and grasping. We decided to start explaining my twitch as Alien Hand Syndrome.

                The very next podcast was about absorbed twins. Some pregnancies begin with two fetuses but one of them dies early in the first trimester and is reabsorbed into the womb. But sometimes- rarely- the fetus is actually absorbed by its twin. Naturally, my dad and I determined that my twitch is a manifestation of my absorbed twin. And it is actually my absorbed twin who has Alien Hand Syndrome. We named her Olivia, and to this day, whenever I unintentionally throw something, I blame it on her. If Tom and I are out to eat and my fork goes clattering to the ground, I’ll simply say, “Oh, it’s just Olivia.” He shrugs and continues eating.

 Situations in which my nervous twitch has presented itself:

• During graduate school, as I was taking a final exam. My pencil shot out of my hand and toward the front of the class. When I picked it up, I made the mistake of holding it with my right hand, at which point I threw it again. Twice. By this time, my classmates were staring at me, presumably wondering why I was pitching a pencil across the room rather than taking the test. I finally realized I could avoid this by holding the pencil with my left hand.

• More recently, during a performance review at work as we were about to discuss my professional competency. Armed with a pencil and a notebook, I felt reasonably confident until my pencil landed under the couch where my boss was sitting. We both poorly pretended it didn’t happen.

• Several times, I have inadvertently thrown my cell phone against the wall. Tom, I think it’s safe to say we’re not getting back our deposit on this apartment.

• Olivia has breached countless time while I’m holding pens, clothes, Diet Cokes, books, and various other items. For a while, I worked in the toddler room of a preschool, but I have yet to throw a baby.

• A few weeks ago, I was paying for a few snack items at a news stand in the airport. Once again, I threw my credit card at the face of the person working at the cash register. Only this time, it was a perfectly lovely young woman who happened to not speak English. Trying to explain that one was uncomfortable.

      Despite the constant low-level embarrassment produced by my twitches, I enjoy them immensely.  It’s as though my body has so much to say that it can’t keep it to itself. With my first nervous twitch, my parents gently teased me about it- teaching me how to laugh at myself in a safe environment. That way, I wasn’t so impacted when other kids made fun of me. My parents and my nervous twitch joined forces to teach me to have a sense of humor about myself. Which is, I think, the most important lesson anyone can learn.

         The new twitch forces me to interact with strangers more than I otherwise would. Yes, I would rather smile vaguely and avoid small talk while purchasing my Diet Coke and Check Mix from the airport newsstand. But when I throw my credit card at a lady’s face, I am forced to interact with the outside world.

                Or at least, Olivia is.

Manatease

            I used to be obsessed with becoming a marine biologist. This lasted approximately from the first time I saw Free Willy until I took biology in high school, at which point I realized how much learning comes between understanding cell reproduction and riding on top of an orca.

            Most girls don’t experience the single-minded fanatical devotion I felt toward marine mammals until they fall in love for the first time with a human. My room was trimmed with a border of orcas breaching. I had dolphin and orca stuffed animals. Posters of sea mammals covered my walls. In fifth grade, we had to write “interest reports”- research projects about any topic we chose. Most of the kids in my class chose to write about sports players or Mariah Carey. I wrote mine about the Short-finned Pilot Whale.

I recently found a journal entry I wrote in sixth grade. I was clearly going through a bit of a rough patch as I wrote, “I think my only reason for self-esteem is my dream.  I WILL live to work with the DOLPHINS.  I swear it.  I will.  It’s practically my reason for living.  I haven’t given up my passion.  No matter how much the boys at school tease me about saving the whales, I won’t stop loving dolphins.  I WON’T!”

            It was tough being obsessed with all things marine life while living in the Midwest. At the time, the best St. Louis had to offer marine-files was a tiny aquarium with a bunch of useless fish and one anemic-looking shark. I used to be jealous of the girls at school who were infatuated with the more attainable animals- cuddly things like kittens and puppies and bunnies. Clearly, there was no room for an orca in our backyard and anyway, how would we afford one? My mom assured me that SeaWorld would not view our golden retriever as a fair trade.

            After assessing my options and finally accepting that my parents weren’t going to move to a remote island inhabited by mystical natives who would teach me how to communicate using sonar, I decided to go with the next best option: adopting a sea mammal.

            I thoroughly researched my options and decided to go with a manatee. Whales and dolphins just seemed a little obvious. And honestly, I felt guilty for not liking manatees as much as their shinier, more extroverted peers. Manatees are shy and seem a little sad. Whereas most dolphins and whales are lithe and playful, manatees are slow and bloated, earning them the unfortunate moniker of “sea cow”.

            After a minimal amount of badgering, my mom agreed to adopt one manatee for me and one manatee for my sister. My sister and I poured over the brochures, looking over the pictures of all of the different manatees available for adoption. We spent what seemed like hours debating the various personality traits attributed to the animals by the non-profit organization that ran the “adoption”. Finally, we chose our pets and sent in our $25.

            Four to six weeks later, we received papers certifying the adoption process. The official papers also contained pictures of our manatees and promises of manatee newsletters to come. I was in sea cow heaven. We named our new pets and hung the pictures up in our rooms. Every morning, I walked to the bus stop with my little secret. The boys on the bus might make fun of me for how hard I tried to save the whales, but I had a manatee.This simple fact rendered the boys insignificant.

            A couple of months later, Lauren received a letter from the non-profit organization regarding her manatee. As we read the letter, we discovered that her manatee had been struck by a boat propeller and killed.

            My mom was horrified. “Who the hell would send a letter like this to a seven year old girl?!” My sister started crying. The good news, the letter assured us, was that for $25 more, we could adopt a brand new manatee.

Death is an important part of the life cycle that every pet owner must learn sooner or later. Regardless, Mom dismissed the entire racket as a scam and wouldn’t let us adopt any more manatees.

            It was probably for the best. Manatees do not age well and I doubt I could have afforded my manatee’s medication with just my allowance. Now that I’m older, I’ve moved on to caring for more sensible animals, animals capable of exhibiting proper affection. I’ve decided to adopt a narwhal. 

The Miracle Worker

As everybody knows, it’s healthy for children to have role models: someone to admire and to whom they can look up. This role model is someone the child spends a lot of time learning about and trying to emulate. As a society, we talk about role models a lot: Ke$ha is a bad one, parents strive to be good ones, Lance Armstrong was a good one but now everyone wants to punch him in the face (although, let’s be honest, most of us wanted to do that before the whole doping scandal). Most young children’s role models are people within their immediate vicinity: parents, extended family members, teachers, coaches, etc. I never even bothered getting into those “my dad is better than your dad” arguments at school because it wasn’t worth it. My dad is better than everyone else’s, period. If the role models aren’t someone the child knows, they’re people kids see in movies or books or magazines. When I was in elementary school, my classmates were preoccupied with New Kids on the Block and Full House (and then there was always that one kid who would never stop talking about Ulysses Grant or Napoleon or something). Me? I was obsessed with Helen Keller.
 

I’m probably the poster child for reasons it may not be a good idea to over-expose young children to culture. For example, I saw my first opera when I was ten. It was Falstaff: The opera based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. It follows the drunken, lecherous escapades of an old man. My aunt took me to see the show and then bought the libretto for me upon my request. The following week, one of the neighborhood moms called my mom and asked her not to buy me any more opera librettos because she had overheard us reciting the lines from Falstaff and didn’t think it was appropriate.

Now, Helen Keller did a lot of really cool things. She graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first person who was both blind and deaf to earn a college degree. She became a world-famous speaker and author. She was a political activist and birth control supporter and was friends with lots of famous people like Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. However, at the time of my obsession, the extent of my Helen Keller knowledge came from the play (and subsequent movies) “The Miracle Worker”. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the play follows Helen Keller, her teacher and companion Annie Sullivan, and the Keller family as they work to help Helen Keller communicate with the world around her. The pinnacle scene of the play involves Helen and Annie standing next to a water pump. Helen’s hands are under the pump as water is flowing out and she’s frantically signing the word for “water”. It’s an exhilarating moment- the audience has witnessed the tantrums and anguish that have accompanied Helen’s inability to communicate. Annie Sullivan has tirelessly worked using unorthodox methods to create the connection in Helen’s mind between the symbolic signs and the objects they represent. The play contains several positive themes that any parent would want for their children: perseverance, innovation, struggling in the face of adversity. Those themes were not immediately apparent to Mom and Dad, though, as I spent hours by the sink, shaping letters with my fingers beneath my imaginary water pump. Or when I was walking around the house with my eyes closed, running into things and emulating Helen Keller’s character by throwing massive pretend tantrums in the dining room.

My fascination with Helen Keller started when I saw a low-budget community theater rendition of The Miracle Worker. After that, I was obsessed with all things Helen Keller. I read every children’s biography of her that I could find. I used dull pencils to punch holes in my paper and pretend it was braille. I had passionate opinions about the merits of each movie version; Anne Bancroft/Patty Duke was the best, but I loved Melissa Gilbert as Helen Keller mostly because I recognized her from Little House on the Prairie. Also, sometimes when I got bored playing Helen Keller, I would switch over and pretend to be Mary Ingalls, because she was also blind and I was good at making prairie skirts out of bed sheets.

My best friend Anna and I learned the American Sign Language alphabet and used it to attempt to communicate in public. We also made up our own secret language so that we could comfortably converse around our peers.  Obviously, Anna and I glided through middle school without ever being teased:  two girls who spoke a secret language and talked relentlessly about Helen Keller.  We were untouchable by bullies mainly due to the inherent cool factor possessed by any twelve year old who still goes home and plays make believe.

                In fact, the biggest fight Anna and I ever had was because of Helen Keller. We were playing "blind kids" for like, the third day in a row. This mostly consisted of closing our eyes and groping around the unfinished basement.  I could tell Anna was losing interest, but she was my last friend who stilled played make believe and I was going to cling to that with the tenacity of the truly self-deluded. One day,  Anna “magically” got her sight back.

                “You can’t do that!” I said, outraged. She looked at me the way my classmates had when I’d attempted to cast a play I’d written about two girls who happened to be blind who were running away from home. Pity mixed with embarrassment.

                “Why not? It’s make believe. I can do whatever I want. Besides, this is really boring.”

                It didn’t matter that she was right, it actually was really boring- I was still pissed. I took a developmental psychology class in college in which we learned that children often use play as a way to work out whatever is going on in their lives. In this way, they can grapple with the complex issues they’re confronting, despite the fact that they may not have fully developed capabilities for abstract thought. Granted, the developmental psychologists who articulated this theory were most likely talking about kindergarten through around third grade- and not about kids who may hit puberty at any moment. Still, that theory makes sense here. As an awkward girl with a unibrow and a nervous twitch who was obsessed with Helen Keller, dolphins, and Yeah-Yeah from The Sandlot, I probably felt as unable to communicate with my peers as a young Helen Keller. Anna, by “magically” getting her sight back, was signifying that she was ready to emerge from our world of make believe and give the real world a try. It was the developmentally healthy thing to do.

Needless to say, we didn’t speak for days.