July Is Worldwide Disability Month — Living With Tourette Syndrome
· William L Hartwick
LIVING WITH TOURETTE SYNDROME — A LETTER FROM WILLIAM L. HARTWICK
July is Worldwide Disability Month, and I want to speak plainly — not as an expert on everyone else's disability, but as a man who has carried his own for a lifetime. My name is William L. Hartwick. I am a retired teacher, a retired principal, an author, and the founder of The Invisible Backpack Organization. I also live with Tourette syndrome.
The Backpack I Didn't Know I Was Carrying
For most of my life, I didn't have a name for what I was going through. As a child I was labeled functionally illiterate. I struggled to read, struggled to write, struggled to sit still in the way the world told me I was supposed to. I wasn't diagnosed with Tourette syndrome until I was 35 years old. Until then, I just thought something was wrong with me — that I was broken, different, or difficult. I wasn't. I was neurodivergent, and no one around me had the words for it.
Why I Founded The Invisible Backpack Organization
I was the child the teacher didn't know what to do with — labeled functionally illiterate, carrying a weight nobody could see. Then I spent my career as a teacher and a principal, and I met that same child in every building I ever worked in. That is why The Invisible Backpack Organization was founded: a movement for neurodiversity awareness, built so that no child is ever written off and no mind is ever mistaken for broken. Every single person is carrying something you cannot see — and no one should have to carry it alone.
How I've Overcome — And Why That Word Is Complicated
I don't believe you "overcome" a disability the way you overcome a bad day. You learn it. You listen to it. You stop apologizing for it. For me, healing came through rhyme and poetry — the very language I was told I couldn't master. It came through teaching children who reminded me of myself. It came through writing my books — The Invisible Backpack: A Life of Courage and my second book, Mental Health, Mental Hell, Mental Help… You Decide — and hearing from readers who finally felt seen. It came through self love, perseverance, and understanding.
What I Do Now — Supporting the World With Its Own Backpack
Through The Invisible Backpack Organization, I work every day to remind people — students, teachers, officers, parents, strangers — that every single person is carrying something you cannot see. Tourette syndrome. Autism. ADHD. Anxiety. Grief. Trauma. A diagnosis nobody has given them a word for yet. My mission is simple: help people set down the invisible weight they carry, and remind the world that every mind is built differently — and that is not a defect. That is a design.
A Message for Worldwide Disability Month
If you live with a disability — visible or invisible — you are not less. You are not broken. You are not a burden. You are carrying something the rest of the world doesn't have to carry, and you are still here. That is not weakness. That is courage wearing everyday clothes. And if you love someone with a disability, the greatest thing you can do this month is not pity them. It is to believe them. Listen when they tell you what they need. Adjust your mindset, not theirs. As I've said for years: I don't believe in changing anybody's mind — but your mindset is adjustable.
Allow Your Ordinary to Become Extraordinary
That is the sentence I have signed my life with. It is the sentence I want every person living with a disability to hear this July. Your ordinary — the way your brain works, the way your body moves, the way you experience the world — is not something to hide. It is the exact place your extraordinary begins.
— William L. Hartwick
Founder | Author | Retired Educator & Principal
The Invisible Backpack Organization
theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com | (904) 609-1313 | william@theinvisiblebackpack.org