Amaris is a middle schooler who has dealt with incredible restraint her whole life. She had Tourette’s Syndrome (or TS) and spent most of her life hiding her tics and muscle spasms from everyone the best she could. She developed techniques to help her suppress them, but at some point she had to relent to these urges to move her body in ways that hurt her but also caused her relief.
Her father was in the military and she often had to move; many times increasing her tics and symptoms. Higher stress tended to escalate the tics she experienced. Most people tend to think of TS as a swearing disease, but that is not really the case. In Amaris’s case, the closest she get’s to a cuss word is omigosh.
Her body was an enemy to her. It offered her little comfort and she was compulsive. She had to repeat muscular movements until she felt relief and sometimes the muscular movements were stretching her legs wide, her head off to the side and tilted back, or her mouth would open as far as it possibly could over and over again. The amount of restraint she used to train her body to hide these tics has been somewhat attributed to her phenom athletic ability. This girl can run.
By the time she was in middle school she found that playing soccer helped her TS immensely, but it was easy to see that when she was playing midfield and running, it was as if the TS was not there at all anymore. After playing for a short while, she relocated to Alabama. She started running track and cross country, and the rest is history.
She races with compulsion. Her TS and obsessive complusion in her physical movements makes her look like grace itself when she moves. Like she is in total control of her body and just floating on air. She’s incredibly fast and it looks so effortless that she’s gaining attention on a national level for how good she is.
She is an eighth grader now, and is one of the best distance runners in the country. There is some talk of her being set for the Olympic track but her coaches are cautious in saying that because there are so many factors involved. He also doesn’t want to push her too hard and burn her out now, so he challenges her, but doesn’t push.
When she trains, her coach needs to have a series of boys run with her and they only can keep up a short while, so they run with her in shifts. She is often running alone in meets or races because she just goes. Finding her freedom from the TS in her running has set her free. All the compulsion and tics are thrown intensely into her race and when she’s done, she’s surrounded by friends and you’d never know she has this other part of her.
But She Knows This Better Than Anyone By Duncan Murrell, Huffington Post
“I don’t think the military is being honest about the problem.”
Kirsten Gilibrand has requested the military give her more information regarding sexual assaults and rapes that go on in and near military bases. The information, or lack thereof, has given her the inclination to believe that the military isn’t really being honest about the amount of assaults and rapes that happen in the military community.
Senator Gilibrand analyzed 107 cases of sexual assault in December and found that the punishments on all were very lenient and out of the cases, only 11 went to trial. There were witnesses who came forward, had rape kits done, and then all of a sudden didn’t want to testify or be a part of the case anymore, which seems a little suspect.
In many cases, the assailant’s word was believed over the victim’s, and civilian women were among the most vicitimized. Basically, this was all brushed under the rug. The amount of reports that Senator Gilibrand even got are such low numbers compared to the number of assaults there have been. To this day, she’s still waiting on all of the reports she’s asked for.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there is some sort of cover up. Whether is just to protect service members who stepped out of line, but have normally good rapport with their command or if the military doesn’t want this type of attention, it is such a big deal. I don’t blame anyone in this, but what we do have to understand is that when a person goes to bootcamp, they typically do not come out the same. There are parts of them that are very different. Outwardly, it could seem like a new sense of responsibility or patriotic pride. In other cases it’s a superiority complex and a need to feel dominant. It all depends on how you were trained in boot camp. It depends greatly on branch of service in some case.
In others, it’s just a personality thing. Either way, from my own experience, military members are trained to feel superior, or the dominant party, to others; leaders. That’s just the way most of us are trained. Sometimes you get good leaders, sometimes you get those who have complexes that cause them to tend to make others feel humiliated or dominated, merely because the leaders don’t feel strong enough as a person. The only way to feel big and in charge is to belittle and dominate those around them. Unfortunately, there are more of those who cross our paths, than real honest to goodness leaders who look out for our highest and greatest good…
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Military Is Under-Reporting Sexual Assault and May Be Intimidating Victims By Terrell Jermaine Starr,Alternet
We are far greater beings than we have been told, far greater beings than most of us realize.
In Light and Love,
Lindsey