The World’s Strongest Librarian

  That one deep breath felt too good to be insignificant.

  The next morning, before the library opened, I went into the stacks and tried to prepare, to calm myself, to ask.

  One…two…three…four…and done. I managed a four-count exhalation and was still. I listened to what was happening inside me. Had anything changed? I tried three more times that day. One perfect breath, each time. Each time was satisfying, a relief.

  I called Adam that night. Before I even told him about the breath he said, “It’s too early to talk about it, buddy. You’ve got a month of experimenting before I’ll weigh in.”

  I had a laboratory now: the restrooms at the library. They have hair-trigger motion sensors for the lights. If you stand perfectly still for about fifteen seconds, the lights go out. But so much as snap your fingers and the lights come back on. My goal was to breathe, focus, and see if I could stay still enough for the lights to go off. Once I could do it, I would see how long I could stay in the dark before triggering the lights.

  The next day I managed twenty full breaths, each one delicious.

  Physical relief and release soaked me at each attempt. Of course it did! What if all this time I’d simply not been getting enough air?

  If you’re not getting enough air you’re in distress, but perhaps I’d simply adapted to distress. It made sense, the euphoria of oxygenated blood. Every tic, whether motor or vocal, was an interruption, disturbing my thoughts, my speech, my body, my heart rate, and my confidence. Every tic interrupted a breath. Try this: For the next sixty seconds, stop every breath you take at the halfway point of the inhalation. Do it by either tensing up your abdomen or clearing your throat. You’ll feel slightly desperate at the end of the minute. But if you did it for the next year, the desperation would become the baseline. Your distress would become normal. You’d forget how good you can feel.

  “Janette, this is going to change everything,” I said. “I really think this is it.”

  She was supportive, but tentative. “I think it’s great, and I’m glad that you guys are working on this, but I’m not sure I understand everything you’ve told me.”

  I’m sure that was true. Adam and I had talked so much, and he was so strange, so unlike anyone else I’d ever met, that it was impossible to re-create our conversations in a way that anyone else could picture.

  “I don’t either,” I said. “I know it sounds confusing, but I’m probably not explaining it well. But at least…doesn’t it make sense that if I could practice not having tics, then I could eventually swing things back so that I had fewer tics in a day? I think…I don’t know, but if this works at all, I think I could scale it up.”

  “Okay. Let’s see what happens. You know I want that. I just don’t want you to work too hard and then be upset if it doesn’t pay off.”

  “But that’s the whole point! It’s not about effort. Effort is what I’ve been doing, and it hasn’t worked.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, think about it! If Max starts to have tics, maybe by that time I’ll know how to help him! Maybe I’ll be able to give him a way out.”

  And that, above all, was the reason I was so desperate to figure out my own Tourette’s. Max had shown no tics, no signs of anything unusual, but the worry consumed me.

  There’s an idea in the bodybuilding world that to make a muscle grow, you have to torture it, to convince it that it’s dying: It swells to protect itself from the onslaught next time. New tissue forms in a million micro-tears. The lifter forces the adaptation. “No pain, no gain.”

  That had been the equivalent of my attempts to stifle the Tourette’s. I would simply bear down and see if I could outlast it through force of will. And it never worked, which made sense to Adam.

  “Think about it, man,” he said. “Think about the people you work with. You all spend your whole day in a chair, right?”

  “Pretty much.” This seemed like a very roundabout way to make a point.

  “Those people’s bodies will adapt to whatever it is they spend their time doing. They’ll wind up shaped like chairs. They can’t will their bodies back to normal. They can’t try harder to have better posture; they just need to sit less, until that becomes normal again. Adaptation never stops. You can’t turn it off and you can’t turn it on. The best you can hope for is to divert it into paths that reward you instead of punish you.”

  I worked on my breathing for the next two months. I tried to practice in a totally ticless state. Stopping before the urges to have tics overcame me was a key. Have you ever seen a weightlifting competition? Or watched one of the World’s Strongest Man competitions that I always get sucked into when they broadcast fifty episodes every Thanksgiving? Have you ever seen someone in a gym struggling against a weight, freaked out as every single vein in their neck emerges like the arms of an octopus streaking toward the surface?

  I’m guessing you have. Maybe you’ve even been that guy. I have. Let’s call that distress training.

  Let’s say that guy spends most of his time lifting in that state. And let’s say he never does anything but biceps curls and bench press. Doesn’t it make sense that his body will start associating those movements with that physical state? If every time you bench it feels incredibly difficult, your body and your neurology remember that. But what if you could receive all of the benefits the “no pain, no gainers” are always chasing, and you didn’t have to become overly tense to make it happen? Would that interest you? Do you think your body might feel better if you never turned purple and ground your teeth to pulp in the gym?

  This is why I didn’t want to struggle as I tried not to have tics while practicing my breathing. I wanted the association to be that when I took a full breath, there were no urges to have tics. I didn’t want to write on the motherboard in a way that signaled that deep breaths were connected to the psychogenic urges. I didn’t know if it was possible, but I wanted to find out. The evidence would be anecdotal, but for the person in pain, it would be enough.

  In December, two months after my Minot trip, I was ready for the experiment. The goal? Sixty seconds of perfect, beautiful stillness. No gimmicks. No straining. No distracting myself by playing the guitar or doing multiplication tables in my head. I wanted to feel what a minute was worth. What it was like for everyone else. What it felt like to live without feeling as if whatever room you were in was a waiting room where nothing but bad news would be announced, whenever it came.

  One of Pavel’s maxims that I still love: Strength is a skill. You don’t work out. You practice. I’d been practicing for this minute.

  It worked! It was the most perfect minute of my life. There are over five hundred and twenty-five million minutes in a year. In 2009, after more than two decades of twitching frustration, I had a minute all to myself.

  I paid for it. I spent the rest of that night getting lashed by Misty. But I didn’t care because I could do it again. I could turn one minute into two. Maybe two would eventually become five.

  I called Adam and reported.

  “Sharper than a razor, brother,” he said. “Was it the breathing?”

  “What! How did you know?”

  “I pay attention. Most people don’t. It was pretty obvious, but I wanted you to figure it out. I knew you’d get there. Hey, I’m eating dinner, but one more thing before I go: The dogs say hi. They miss you.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s not a joke,” he said.

  Adam would later tell me that he had autism. It had taken someone whose brain didn’t work like anyone else’s to ask me questions that nobody else had.

  * Frankie would eventually compile his ideas into a system called Gym Movement.

  CHAPTER 12

  121—Belief and Doubt

  155.432—Mothers and Sons

  “Hey, man, there’s some psycho back there talking to himself. If you don’t deal with it, I will.” He points back toward the cookbooks. This guy is big.

  I nearly tell him that I’ve just finished read
ing Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, which led me to read Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, and that, while it was unlikely that the man talking to himself is actually a psychopath, I’ll go check it out anyway.

  I ask a coworker to call security and have a guard come find me, in case we have a situation.

  Once I start walking, it’s easy to find the guy by the sound of his voice. I turn a corner to see a man in the cookbook aisle, gesturing wildly at something in front of him.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask.

  He startles. “I’m so sorry, I know how loud I’m being, they just won’t leave me alone.” He’s approximately my age, a nice-looking man with curly blond hair and clothes that look new. But his face is gaunt and several scabs dot his forehead. “I don’t mean to be loud but they won’t…” His head whips to the left. “Did you hear that?”

  He turns and hurries to the end of the aisle.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say, catching up with him. “What are you hearing?”

  “There are three women harassing me,” he says, talking faster with each word. “They just won’t leave me alone, and if you just—ohhhhhh—if you could just hear the things they’re telling me, you’d—I don’t know, you’d—”

  “Can you show them to us?” says the security guard who now stands beside me. “It’s helpful to have a description.”

  “See, the problem is that I’ve never seen them,” says the man. “They’ve been following me for years, and, the thing is, they’re always just ahead of me, around the corner. So I run, and I tell them to stop, and I’m sorry about the noise, but I can’t get them to stop, and they’re always just around the next corner.” He’s near tears, desperate.

  “You’ve never seen them?” asks the guard.

  “They’re real. They are,” he says. “They’re so close, but I can’t show you. I can’t catch them. They’re laughing. If you could hear them…I’m not just talking to myself. They’re real. It’s real. You really don’t hear that?”

  “Have you been drinking tonight, sir?” asks the guard.

  “No.”

  “Any drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Do you take any medication?”

  “Yes, but not right now. I don’t like it.”

  The guard encourages the poor guy to come to his office and set up a plan for catching his tormentors.

  Before they leave, the man says, “I wasn’t always like this. I’m so sorry.”

  The more I practiced the breathing, the more I examined other things that seemed associated to the tics.

  I learned that when I entered a new room, the change in lighting made me want to have tics. But if I walked into a room with my eyes closed, the urges diminished.

  I learned that I could alter the speed of certain tics with some success. Especially with the big whiplash tics, this was a revelation. Sometimes having tics at half speed released me from the urges. That would save huge amounts of wear and tear.

  It was the basic scientific method. Form a hypothesis, design an experiment, evaluate the result, confirm or refute your hypothesis, and then keep going or perform a new experiment. Whatever movement I wanted to test, I’d perform the baseline toe touch Adam had shown me. If something increased my range of motion, it was a “good movement right now.” That status could change—in a week, day, or hour—but I could always test it again. I’d practice the movement up until the moment before it felt challenging, because I didn’t want my brain to make an association between a good movement and effort; that was a recipe for a tic. If the movement felt noticeably harder than the one before it, if the speed of a rep decreased, if I panted or held my breath while doing it, if I tensed my jaw or any other body part, if I got pulled out of alignment, or if I felt pain—these were signs that I’d gone too far. I had no idea how much tension I carried in my body until it began to let go of me.

  Every tic began to feel more like a challenge and an opportunity, rather than a sock in the guts or a kick in the balls or a reinforcement of my flaws. The more I asked, the more I could ask.

  That was in January. By March I went for two minutes without tics. Two minutes became five. Then an hour. A day without tics. A month where I didn’t notice any tics, although Janette said I was having some mild ones. But she was astonished at the progress. All apparently from the breathing, and from testing out the movements I used when I exercised, avoiding anything that made me more rigid.

  I worked at the library.

  I loved my wife.

  I played with my son.

  I read, trained, and wrote.

  I loved my life.

  “I told you, man,” said Adam. “I think you’re getting close to actually knowing something about all this. Have some faith.” He laughed and hung up.

  Faith was about the only thing in my life that wasn’t going well. Now, in the midst of my track-and-measure-everything phase, I was more aware than ever that gauging spiritual progress was difficult. On a scale of one to ten, just how righteous do I feel today? I have no idea. What does righteous mean anyway? But I kept my doubts to myself—except for when I was with Janette, who knew I was struggling with faith, but said she’d never force the issue—and things carried on just as they had for the past few years.

  Then my mom came to visit us for a week that summer. When Max and I picked her up at the airport, he rushed into her arms and forgot I existed for the next seven days. That night, Janette and I read on our bed while my mom and Max played in the backyard.

  The back door opened and footsteps pounded over the floor as Max appeared in our room. “Come watch the show!” he said, before running back outside.

  We went to the sandbox, where my mom was sitting in a chair next to several overturned buckets. “Okay, Max,” she said, “show them what’s under the buckets.”

  Max lifted the buckets one by one, revealing three goats from a toy farm set, and a grumpy-looking plastic lion. “Dad, are you ready for the show?” he asked.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “One day,” my mom said, “the three Billy Goats Gruff were hungry. But…” She looked at Max, who was positioning the three goats at the foot of a bridge. The bridge was made of a large stick and spanned the gap between two mounds of sand.

  “But they ate all their grass,” he said. “And the bridge—”

  She leaned down and stage-whispered, “The bridge comes later, remember?”

  “The bridge comes later,” Max told me.

  “So they’d eaten all their grass,” she continued. “And so they looked on the other side of the bridge and…what did they see? A green field of delicious grass! So the first, smallest Billy Goat Gruff went to the bridge, but when he walked out—pitter patter pitter patter”—Max made the goat dance onto the bridge—“a mean old troll came up from under the bridge and said…”

  Max put the lion—standing in for the troll—under the bridge quickly, then pulled it out and set it before the startled goat. “You can’t have my grass!”

  Janette laughed.

  “Well, no, he didn’t want the grass,” said my mom. “He said, ‘I’m going to eat you!’ So what did the goat say, Max?”

  “He jumped over his head!” And sure enough, the plastic goat jumped over the troll’s head and landed on the other side of the bridge.

  “Well,” said my mom. “That’s not exactly—”

  Max was spinning the goat around on the other side of the bridge, drunk on delicious grass. “And he ate it all and got so fat that he never moved again!”

  My mom persuaded Max to help the other two goats across the bridge like they had practiced. If you don’t know the story, when the biggest goat comes to the bridge, he throws the troll off the bridge, into the water, and, if memory serves, the troll is never heard from again. Max put the troll under the bridge.

  My mom said, “Okay, do it!”

  Max ran behind a nearby stone and returned with a bucket that brimmed with wate
r. He poured it onto the ground, at the mouth of a channel they had dug in the sand. The water rushed down the furrow and, sure enough, taught the troll a harsh lesson as he drowned in agony.

  Janette and I cheered.

  My mom stood and took Max’s hand. “Remember?”

  They bowed deeply.

  “Josh, do you remember how we used to do this?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. “How could I forget?” Her storytelling voice was like a time machine, dropping me right back into our living room, thirty years earlier.

  “Okay,” my mom said, “now tell Mom and Dad to go inside. Say, ‘We’re not done playing.’”

  “You go inside.” Max pointed at us.

  I’m never more aware of what a lucky kid I was than when I see my mom playing with Max.

  The next day I looked up from a book to see my mom smiling at me. “What?”

  “I just can’t believe you’re able to sit still like that. You haven’t had one tic in the last few minutes. It’s such a blessing.”

  I laughed. “If you ever get to meet Adam, I want to be there when you tell him that he’s a blessing.”

  On Sunday, we all went to church. After sacrament, the first hour, she leaned over and said, “Let’s take Max home. I don’t really care about going to other meetings in a ward with people I don’t know.” I was delighted to skip out early.

  “You didn’t fight to stay very hard,” she said as we drove home.

  “When I go now, I hardly ever stay after the first hour.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed. Maybe it was time. “Mom, I’m just not getting anything out of it anymore. It’s not for me. I’m sorry.”

  “What are you apologizing to me for?”

  “I don’t know. For keeping it from you, I guess.”

  “You think this is a surprise to me? I’ve been watching this happen for years, Josh.”

  “Well, aren’t you mad?”

  “It doesn’t make me happy, you know that. It breaks my heart. But I’m not mad. You’re making me feel like the grandma from Flowers in the Attic. What did you think I was going to say? ‘Go cut me a switch’?”