Let’s begin from first principles: I was the smartest person in the room.
Ever since the moment I realized in primary school that I was leagues ahead of my teachers, that assumption has served as the foundation of my identity. A near-eidetic memory and a quick wit that cloaked an introverted and abrasive personality with charm, I never had to state it out loud to get the message across to everyone else. I had done a PhD for fun because I wanted to take a crack at this cancer nonsense, too, for crying out loud. But here was my secret: I never bothered to learn very much – I just remembered a few basic principles, and used the spare cycles of my brain to re-derive any necessary information from a given situation all the way to an inevitably correct conclusion.
And then, exactly seven years ago in July of 2016, I realized that I could no longer do basic mental math.
What does it mean when such a flimsy premise collapses underneath you, eroded by a neurodegenerative condition?
What happens to a person who operates on cockiness and sheer willpower alone when they literally lose their dopamine?
There is no coping, no closure when every day is a new loss. You don’t bother with Denial anymore, because you never reached Acceptance any of the previous days anyway. Every little detail that defined you washes away – your right hand has lost its cunning (and then the left), your tongue cleaves, your feet stick, you lose over an inch of height from 26 to 34. You even lose your pride.
My old therapist once saw the need to break with her practice of letting me wander unguided to where I felt needed consideration before honing in, and intervened by confronting me point blank with the truth: “You have never had a secure relationship. Shaped by disappointment and neglect and abandonment, you have whittled down your relationships with other people because the only person you trust – the only person you believe you can rely on – is you.” “And now even that has left me.” She would have tossed confetti if she had any on hand.
What name do you give your Parkinson’s, when it has stripped away every recognizable element of your identity, when all that it is left of me is the Parkinson’s?
I am the Parkinson’s. When I look into myself to try and find me, all I see is the hollow space where my substantia nigra was.
A blank canvas.
Let’s begin from first principles.
There is no god but God. All things are made of atoms. I am of flesh, blood, and bones, however meager.
He is Just. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I will be held to account for what I have done.
He is Before the First and After the Last. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. I will do what it is that I can do.
I am still in the room.