Hey y'all!

This is just a lil discussion I wanted to have, maybe get some insight from other people who experience the same issue as I do. When it comes to my tics, the best way I can describe their frequency is that within an hour I can, say, maybe tic 30 times, but instead of that meaning a tic every 2 minutes, it means I was fine for 50 minutes and then I ticced 30 times in a row in a singular minute. This isn't 100% exactly what happens every time, as I do have bad days where I just can't stop ticcing, and that's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's the general consensus.

Most of my tics are bothersome and all of them are unwanted. Punching my arm hurts. Bashing my head against my shoulder not only hurts but is also very disorienting and can cause a lot of nausea if done too much. Winking bothers my eyes and twitching the right corner of my mouth strains my face as if I'd been smiling hard for too long.

Then, I've got movements that are soothing to me. I really like smacking my lips together to make "pop" sounds (like when people put on lipstick and then pop their lips after rubbing it in), for some reason it's just very soothing. I don't actively choose to do this, it just happens kind of subconsciously. I can stop it if I try hard enough but it does cause me distress. However, I don't think it's a tic, because there's no build up or preliminary feeling and it just doesn't feel the same way my motor and vocal tics do. I consider this more akin to subconcious (and sometimes concious) stimming.

But these lines get blurred a bit when I have a tic that's similar, if not entirely, one of my stims. One of my tics is aggressively and violently shaking a fork, pencil, pen, other similar utensil/object in my hand, or even just my actual hand sometimes. It's triggered decently severely by cutlery to the point where sometimes I can't eat a meal without shaking my fork around literally everytime I'm not using it to actively shovel something into my mouth. Writing can be very slow sometimes because I can't stop shaking my pen up and down. I get a lot of weird looks when I start violently flapping my hand around out of nowhere too, almost especially if there's nothing in my hand for me to shake.

This is overlapped because one of my favourite stims is hand-flapping. I do it most in the grocery store because grocery stores stress me out a bit lol and flapping my hand around makes me feel at ease and also helps me concentrate on buying the things I need. I do not tend to tic a lot when I'm stimming, which is nice, so it also helps me from being a ticcing mess in a busy grocery store.

This was an issue for a while though because I could never tell when I was stimming or ticcing. It was only when my shaking tic started getting actively aggressive and my stimming stayed gentle and harmless to my wrist that I started being able to tell what was a tic and what was a stim.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. Anybody else have experiences with this? I love hearing how other people experience their tic disorders and any other disorders they may have in conjunction. At the very least, I hope my disconjointed storytelling was interesting.

Thanks!