4 ideas
Jess Thom, a London play worker with Tourette's, kept a year-long diary of her verbal and motor tics, including saying 'biscuit' up to sixteen thousand times a day alongside surreal phrases and involuntary movements. With friend Matthew Pountney she started logging the tics publicly as 'Touretteshero,' a superhero alter ego. Through that project she turned a condition she had hidden and minimised into a visible, shareable body of material.
Involuntary verbal tics produce a constant stream of random, often absurd word combinations, which Thom treats as a generator of creative raw material rather than as noise to suppress. Recording the output and then using it as prompts for art, stories and performance converts an uncontrollable symptom into an asset with its own aesthetic value.
In this view a disabled person's difficulties come less from the impairment itself than from spaces, rules and attitudes built on the assumption that everyone behaves the same way. Rules such as silence in shared spaces, together with other people's discomfort, are what shut a person out, so the fix is to change the setting and expectations rather than the person.
Thom argues that her tics are often genuinely funny, and that openly inviting others to laugh with her removes the awkward tension of pretending not to notice. Naming the absurdity first gives onlookers permission to respond honestly. That shifts the encounter from pity or embarrassment to connection, while she keeps control of the framing.