I wasn’t much of a student. Actually, that’s an understatement: I despised school. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus, desperately wanted to be anywhere but at my desk. I hated school, hated everything about it – the tick, tick of the clock on the wall. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. The screech of chairs scraping across floors, the hardness of the seat beneath me. And worse: all those long, long hours of sitting still. I escaped the only way I knew how: I became the kid who raised his hand five, six, seven times a day. When it wasn’t the bathroom, I’d say I needed to go see the nurse.

I wasn’t a troublemaker. I wasn’t impertinent. The teachers liked me. But year after year, the comments on my report cards basically came down to a single point, and it was 100% accurate: I seemed to get nothing whatsoever out of all those long hours spent in the classroom. They were what I had to do until I could burst into the open air and get to the things that really mattered: sports.

When I was six, my mom signed me up for sports leagues. First, she signed me up for tee-ball [junior softball]. Because I was a big kid, standing head and shoulders above all the other boys my age, the coach put me in the outfield. But nothing happened in the outfield. I stood and waited as a bunch of short kids swung and missed. At best, they might send a ground ball rolling toward first base. So as I stood around in the field, I’d make up an imaginary game in my head. By the time the other team had gotten three outs, I was running wild all over that outfield, waving my arms and shouting, caught up in this imaginary game.

Then we tried soccer. My first team was called the Rangers, and we wore green T-shirts. I had no skill whatsoever. None. I couldn’t dribble or trap a ball or even complete a pass. But I was fast. I ran past the other kids, got to the ball first, and blasted it up the field. Because I was tall and relatively fearless, the coach of the Rangers wanted me in goal. But I didn’t want me in goal. Standing in goal was as bad as standing in the outfield in tee-ball. It wasn’t where the action was. If I was standing in goal, I couldn’t score. Playing up front, I was always one goal away from being a hero. As a goalie, I was one goal away from being a villain.

“If you play goalie for half the game,” coach pleaded with me, “I’ll let you be the striker for the other half.” I sighed, and did as I was told, restlessly watching the action I wasn’t involved in. Then suddenly, the other team would race down the field and the ball would sail right at me. At that moment, I felt the weight of the whole team – which, to a kid, meant the whole world – on me. I wanted so badly to stop the ball. At the same time, I was terrified I wouldn’t.

Often I did stop it. But when I didn’t – and when the other team’s parents started cheering and the kids who weren’t in green began leaping all over the field – I knew what it felt like to be exposed, all alone at a moment of spectacular failure. It was too much. I often started crying right there on the field.

I was 10 when the symptoms began to appear. First came the touching: I walked through the house tapping certain objects in a particular order. Touch the railing. Touch the door frame. Touch the light switch. Touch the wall. Touch the picture. The pattern might vary, but there was always a specific rhythm, and it had to be followed. Exactly. If it wasn’t – if I tried to resist – I had to start all over again, until I got it right. It didn’t matter if I was starving and dinner was on the table. It didn’t matter how badly I needed to go to the bathroom. I had to obey the pattern inside my head. I had to touch these things, and in exactly this order. It was urgent.

One part of my brain, the logical part, understood that these rituals were irrational, that nothing bad would happen if I didn’t practice them. But knowing that only made things worse. If it wasn’t rational, then why couldn’t I stop? What was wrong with me?

Then similar things started happening outside of the house, on my way to school. Each day, I walked to school carrying a bag full of books. I spotted things along the way – a rock, for example. There was nothing special about the rock’s shape or texture or colour; it looked like every other rock. But suddenly, that rock was special, the most important object in the world. Pick up that rock, my mind commanded. You’d better pick up that rock. I tried my damnedest not to. I gritted my teeth and stared ahead, trying to convince myself that everything was OK, that I could leave the rock. I might manage to walk a few steps before my heart started pounding. Go back, my body urged me. Pick up that rock.

If I resisted, I became physically uncomfortable. My stomach churned. I might break out into a sweat. I started to breathe harder, feeling like the oxygen had been sucked out of the air around me. Sometimes I wanted to throw up then and there. For some inexplicable reason, the fate of the universe rested on this one act: picking up that rock. Finally, I gave in, I turned around, got the rock, and dropped it in my bag. I felt a flood of relief. Everything was OK now. The universe was back in control again.

Over the following weeks, my bag became filled with rocks and acorns and dirt and flowers and grass stems – all the crap I was driven to pick up on the way to school. As I arrived, I waved to the crossing guard, as if having to haul this enormous bag around was perfectly normal – Oh nothing, just my books and things, have a nice day! As if I hadn’t just lost a fierce battle with my own brain. As if I didn’t feel these compulsions to do things I could never in a million years understand, much less explain.

Next came the tics. Each started the same way: with an uncomfortable sensation in some part of my body – a heightened awareness, an urge. The feeling could be relieved only by some specific motor action. I started blinking, for example – forceful, deliberate blinks that I couldn’t stop. I began to clear my throat over and over. Then there were facial jerks. Shoulder shrugs. Eye rolling.

With each of them it was the same pattern: that awful sensation welling up, the one that could only be relieved, inexplicably, by some action. As soon as I did it, I felt normal again. Seconds later, the cycle would repeat. Terrible sensation. Buildup of stress. Action. Relief. In school, teachers snapped at me – sit still. Stop clearing your throat. Other kids laughed. What’s going on with your face? At home, mom stayed quiet, but I could feel her watching. I saw how her eyes zeroed-in on whatever part of my body I’d moved, the flicker of concern that passed over her face. I hated that I couldn’t knock it off, be a little easier on a woman who deserved some peace of mind. But, of course, that was impossible.

On the soccer field, though, my whole world changed. While the ball was far away, my mind might still order me around (touch the ground, twitch, snap the Velcro on the goalie glove, cough, touch the goalpost, blink). But the closer that ball came, the more my symptoms receded. The tics, the crazy thoughts, the conflicting mental messages – poof! They were gone in an instant. So were the details around me. Players, colours, people on the sidelines, they all blurred and fell away.

Only one thing remained in sharp focus, its every detail vivid: the ball, moving toward me. I would kick it or catch it or parry it. Or it would elude me and I’d have to pick it out of the net while the other team celebrated. Either way, whether I had succeeded or failed, that’s when everything became crystal clear again – players, colours, spectators, scoreboard. And then, too, the intrusive thoughts. Touch the ground. Touch the post. Twitch, jerk, cough.

When I was 11, I developed a new symptom, the worst one yet: I had to touch people before I talked to them. When I say “had to”, that’s exactly what I mean: if I didn’t touch them first, I literally couldn’t form the words. It was like touching the person opened the door to my thoughts, allowed vague ideas to flow into concrete words. But if I didn’t touch the person, everything in my brain just kept thumping against the door, unable to escape. At school, I tried to hide this tic through casual touches – I might punch a kid lightly in the arm, or tap him on the opposite shoulder from behind, as if trying to make him look the wrong way. Sometimes I faked bumping into them. At home, I touched my mom on the shoulder. One tap. Then I could talk.

She glanced down at the place I just touched. She didn’t say a word. After a while, when I stepped toward her, she began stepping backward, slightly out of reach. “Go ahead,” she encouraged. “What were you saying?” But I couldn’t tell her. I stood there mute. Just tell her, my brain screamed. Tell her something. No words came. I was helpless to control my own brain, my own body.

Mom took me to a paediatric neurologist. He peppered us with questions about my behaviour. If I’d had any doubts about whether I’d been hiding my symptoms, that visit made it clear: I hadn’t been. Mom described it all: the compulsive touching, the twitching, the blinking. She’d noticed everything.

The doctor put words to my symptoms. I had obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, and Tourette syndrome, TS – a double whammy of brain difference, a worrisome one-two punch. OCD is an anxiety disorder, one that brings conscious intrusive thoughts and compulsions – touch the bannister. Pick up that rock. You’d better do it or something terrible will happen. TS, on the other hand, creates almost unconscious physical urges. The two are closely related – at least a third of TS patients have OCD. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the difference be tween a tic and a compulsion. But while tics stem from an urge in a specific part of the body – either completely unconsciously or through a premonitory sensation that’s satisfied only by the tic – OCD bubbles up as conscious thoughts in the mind.

What mom already knew, and I learned over time, is that most people don’t understand TS. They think of it as a “cursing disease”, a disorder that makes people swear uncontrollably. That’s how it’s usually depicted on television. It’s a trope, because it makes a great punch line. And sure, that form exists, but it’s rare – fewer than 10% of all diagnosed TS cases. But there are myriad possible tics. In fact, TS looks different in everyone who has it – I’ve heard it called a “fingerprint condition”, and that’s exactly right. No two people have the same case. Some people echo other people’s words. Some hoot, some cough, some hiss or bark or grunt. There are motor tics, too – in fact, it’s not TS unless a person has both vocal and motor tics – like nose wrinkling, grimacing, kicking, or even jumping. Complicating matters, even in a single person tics often change over time, too.

So now we had a name for my urges, but not much else. There was no reliable treatment or cure. Some children did extremely well on medication; others moved from cocktail to cocktail, each one causing different side effects to little avail. But the doctor explained some other things, too – curious things. He said that he had seen some examples of people with these disorders having some special gifts – an ability to hyper-focus, to stick with a task until it’s 100% mastered. He had also seen a kind of hyper-sensitivity – an ability to see and feel and smell things that others couldn’t.

As we walked out of the office, he said, almost as an afterthought, “I’ve been doing this a long time, and there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of: with every challenge a kid faces, there’s some flip side. I have no way to prove it, but I believe this: there’s always a flip side.”

Soon after, my mother met with teachers and administrators at my middle school. She had gone in armed with all the information she could find: photocopies of books from libraries, pamphlets ordered from organisations, copies of every article she’d been able to find. These were the days before the internet, of course; mom had to work hard for the information she had. She sat in the classroom, a nurse, teachers, administrators, and the district psychologist arrayed in a semicircle around her. Not one of them picked up any of her handouts. One teacher even asked: “Are you sure Tim has Tourette syndrome? Because you know, Mrs Howard, there are so many labels these days that people use to excuse bad behaviour.” “Well shit”, my mom thought. “Now I’m going to have to fight these people, too”. Before she had gone in, she felt alone. Now she felt worse than alone; she felt outnumbered. She cried the whole way home.

But it was true what the doctor said about an ability to hyper-focus – at least when it came to sports. I watched a documentary about Pelé, then spent hour upon hour in the backyard trying to master his techniques – stepovers, cutbacks, stop-and-gos. I practised day after day, sometimes not even hearing my mom when she called me in for dinner.

I discovered that an Italian cable station broadcast Milan’s games. Saturdays became devoted to studying Roberto Donadoni’s artful footwork, the way the ball seemed almost Velcroed to his foot as he dribbled down the field.

The thing is, those teachers were right: if I had given school the focus and attention I gave to my athletic pursuits, I’d have had endless potential. But I knew I would never care about homework the way I cared about making myself faster, stronger, quicker, more agile.

The more I played, the more I began to understand what the doctor had said about enhanced perception. I could see things somehow, things that other people didn’t seem able to. I could see, for example when a game was about to shift, could sense the attacking patterns before they happened. I knew exactly when the winger was about to cross the ball and whose head it would land on. I could see the flicker of a striker’s eyes before he pivoted. Sometimes I even saw it in time to warn my defender.

This is an edited extract from The Keeper: A Life Of Saving Goals And Achieving Them, by Tim Howard, is published on Tuesday by HarperCollins, priced £18