Love Is the Answer: The Story Behind the Poem That Unpacked 53 Years of Living with Tourette's Syndrome
· William L Hartwick
A blog by William L. Hartwick
The Thirty-Five Year Shadow
Before I ever set foot in a classroom as a teacher, before I spent twenty-seven years leading schools as a principal, I was the boy in the desk that nobody knew what to do with. I was labeled functionally illiterate. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. But worse than the academic struggle was the physical battle happening inside my own nervous system.
For thirty-five years of my life, I lived in total darkness about why my body betrayed me. I would jump from uncontrollable laughter to sudden, agonizing tears. Involuntary twitches racked my muscles. Vocal sounds slipped out without permission. And in response, the world around me did what it so often does to children who don’t fit the mold: it punished me.
Adults were the worst of all. Dale Thomas kicked me out of class and called me a son of a bitch. Coach Jeff Nynehouse threw up his hands in disgust on the team bus, saying he couldn’t handle me. The people charged with keeping me safe made me the target of shame. High school was a nightmare of isolation and survival.
When I went to college at Tau Kappa Epsilon, my fraternity brothers gave me the nickname “Twitch.” For the first time, people saw me and didn’t run away. It wasn’t cruel; it was brotherhood. It was a term of endearment that I carried with pride, even while the root cause remained a mystery.
When Medicine Fails the Heart
When the diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome finally arrived at age thirty-five, you would think relief followed. Instead, a new nightmare began: the medical fiasco. Doctors began writing prescriptions for heavy psychiatric and neurological medications. They chemically subdued my body until I felt like I was losing my mind. Prescribing pills for a neurological condition without offering a shred of emotional understanding is not care—it is a slow form of erasure.
People on the street would joke, “I want some of what you're on, can I have some shit?” And I would look at them with exhaustion and say, “I have Tourette's, you want some of it?”
The breaking point came in 2018. Exhausted, stressed, and experiencing severe physical tics, I was pulled over. The officers didn’t see a dedicated educator or a human being with a neurological condition. They saw strange movements, assumed intoxication, and arrested me for a “DUI other than alcohol.” Sitting on the cold floor of a jail cell, stripped of my dignity, the weight of fifty-three years of bottled-up pain came crashing down on my head.
The Turning Point: The Life Healing Center
That arrest destroyed my old life, but it forced me into the place where my new life would begin: the Life Healing Center in July 2018. I walked through those doors broken, traumatized, and furious at the world. For the first time in fifty-three years, I stopped running. I had to face the monster in the mirror.
At the Life Healing Center, I began the brutal, necessary work of unpacking my invisible backpack. When you open a backpack that has been stuffed with half a century of fear, rejection, and trauma, it doesn’t come out like a gentle breeze. As I wrote in my blog The Wind Inside Your Invisible Backpack, it erupts like a Category 5 hurricane. I was angry. I was mean. I was terrified. But the clinicians and counselors at the Life Healing Center didn’t kick me out into the hall like my high school teachers did. They held the space. They helped me realize that a mind changed against its will is of the same opinion still—true healing can only begin when a human chooses love over defense.
That is where the truth crystallized. In my poem, I wrote the words directly to my physician: “Sorry, Dr. Narus, love is the answer; please start prescribing hugs.” Medication could never fix what trauma had broken. The only medicine that works is radical acceptance, human connection, and unconditional love.
The Message for Schools in General
When I look back at my twenty-seven years as a public school principal, managing elementary and middle schools, I know why we were able to turn failing schools around. We didn’t do it with rigid rubrics or punitive suspensions. We did it by living out the four truths that now form the foundation of our organization’s work:
1. Is the Problem the Child or the Classroom??? A child who thrives in the gym, on the stage, or building with their hands isn’t broken when they struggle in a traditional desk. If our classroom structure requires a child to be broken before teaching can begin, the structure is what needs to change—not the child.
2. Teach Me the Way I Learn Please. Sitting quietly in a chair is proof of compliance, not comprehension. When a student has Tourette’s, ADHD, or autism, an involuntary movement or sound is not defiance. Stop punishing involuntary biology and start listening to the human voice behind the tick.
3. I Wanna Meet ‘THEM’. I couldn’t read or write well on Scantron tests, but I was smart enough to beat the scoring machine. Intelligence isn’t defined by an A, B, C, D, or F bubble. Performance-based learning lets children demonstrate what they actually know in reality, not on a standardized sheet.
4. The Wind Inside Your Invisible Backpack. Every student and every teacher carries an invisible emotional load. If schools do not create safe, compassionate spaces to unpack that pressure, the hurricane will eventually hit our hallways, our families, and our communities.
Don’t Ever Let Them Put You in a Box
In the final lines of my poem, I gave a command to every human who carries a difference: “To all of you that have this ‘gift,’ the one that makes me, me: Don’t ever let them put you in a box; live and be free.”
To the superintendents, principals, school board members, and teachers across this country: stop building boxes for our children in all schools. Stop measuring human worth by quiet compliance. Love the child in front of you. Teach them the way they learn. And watch what happens when you allow their ordinary to become extraordinary.
— William L. Hartwick
Founder, Author & 27-Year Retired Public School Principal
The Invisible Backpack Organization
“Where ordinary becomes extraordinary.”
Website: https://theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com
Email: william@theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com
Phone: 904.609.1313