A few months ago, a friend who works at a private school in Providence told us that a speaker with TS was coming to the school where she works. I immediately blurted out "Is it Marc Elliott?!" Marc is a 25 year old motivational speaker who is known internationally for speaking about tolerance. I have seen various clips of him and was so impressed by what I had seen that I really wanted to see him live. She said "I don't know, but you and Liam are welcome to come as my guests". A few days later she touched base via email and it was indeed Marc Elliott that we were getting the chance to see! This morning (after I called Liam out of school) we hopped into the car and drove to Providence to meet our friend. She met us outside of the building and as we walked into the entrance to the auditorium, Marc was standing there talking to one of our friend's coworkers. She introduced us, and Liam and Marc had the chance to chat. Marc is exuberant, funny, charismatic, self effacing and genuinely kind and caring. He treated Liam like he was a rock star. I told Marc that we were having an all TS day lined up- Marc, our first appointment with our new therapist who is going to work with Liam on HRT, and our monthly TSA meeting. Marc gave Liam some excellent advise on HRT. He told him that it may really help him a lot, that it is A LOT of hard work, and most importantly, not to beat himself up inside if it doesn't work for him.
Liam left to use the rest room and Marc explained to us that lots of times when you're trying to control the urge to tic it's overwhelming and it's all you can concentrate on. He said that it takes a lot of hard work for HRT to be successful.
There were a few things that really stuck out from his presentation. He talked about tolerance, and why teaching tolerance is more important than teaching acceptance. While acceptance is the ideal that we should all strive for, we are all human, and we all make assumptions about other people all the time. The important thing to remember is not to turn those assumptions into actions. Live and let live.
Marc mostly told stories of peoples' reaction to him. The story that I think will stay with me for a very long time was that he asked someone who had a very accepting reaction to his TS why he was so accepting. The other man "Jay" (who Marc met on a subway platform in NYC) said that he was on a bus one day and there was a very loud kid screaming at the front of the bus while Jay was at the back. Everyone on the bus was kind of talking about why the father (who appeared to be sitting next to the child) wasn't doing anything. Finally someone else on the bus walked up to the dad and said "will you please control your child?". The father explained that they were on their way home from the child's mother's funeral. Jay's take away from this experience was that you never know what is going on in someone else's life, you never know what challenges they are facing. If you can be accepting, that's the ideal, but at the very least we should all be tolerant.
After the presentation, Liam and I went up to stay good bye, and you would have thought Marc was saying good bye to his best friend in the whole world, he gave Liam a big hug.
(to visit Marc's website, go to the link on the right hand side of the page)
So now we're on to TS adventure #2 of the day- Liam's new therapist, Dr. Bidwell. I'm nervous but hopeful that this will help Liam feel more comfortable.
Tonight we're going to our monthly TSA meeting. This month one of his new friends is bringing Yu Gi Oh cards, TSA meeting and Yu Gi Oh duel combined- what could be better?
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