I’ve been trying to update this for a long time but ultimately worsening Tourette’s has stopped me. I’m sure the absence of blogs has been a priority for many people over the last two years. While the pandemic has added a lot of material to cover, the energy spent on dealing with increasingly difficult circumstances left me with little time or energy. The focus on coping with Tourette’s took such a toll that writing about it all the time needed to take a backseat. Despite that I’d end up writing in my head every other day or making endless notes. So hopefully there are quite a lot of new chapters on the way.

After a difficult few months I had been hoping to turn things around in 2020 and find more stability to improve my health. Well, that didn’t quite work out! Having COVID early on in the pandemic set me back with symptoms such as chronic fatigue and circulation issues lasting the rest of the year. It became difficult to discern what aspects of health were due to Tourette’s and what was the impact of COVID, let alone communicate that effectively to neurologists.

My work came to a halt at the start of the pandemic and not having been freelance for that long, I wasn’t covered by any furlough. Even as pieces of work returned I found myself exhausted by it, unable to read or write as I had previously. I was writing in slow motion and my attention span had gone from poor to non-existent. The situation was made more difficult by not having a permanent home since the start of the pandemic.

I’ve stayed in many different places, with most of my belongings in storage and little control over my environment. If anything is sure to exacerbate Tourette’s it’s that. While difficult, I hope it’s tested my ability to cope with it to new limits. In the last six months I have gone from very little work to far too much. While hitting my health in the short term, this combined with a new permanent job does thankfully mean I will soon have a far healthier living situation. Despite the turmoil of this year, I did find time to visit Glasgow to film a short Tourette’s dating show. More on that later.

So there we are. The irony of experiencing a chronic health condition too much to find the time, energy or will to write about it. Let’s see how it goes this time.