FOMO “the fear of missing out” has followed me like a shadow for most of my life, providing the incentive to keep active, involved, and engaged. Keeping active becomes increasingly more important in handling Parkinson’s as the decades unwind. If languishing in bed becomes your default state, then you are already dead.
Realizing deeply how this message translates to a soul in emotion turmoil, it still needs to be said in the toughest language of love accessible to our base humanity. If you find life under the veil of chronic disease to be unbearable except by succumbing to the real, but not inevitably dark and sordid, apathetic depression induced by your particular malady, then from a place of love I give you this harshest of recommendations.
Get up. Get out. Get on with your life…
Try something, anything, knowing in your heart that there is no finish line to this race, no closure, nobody coming to rescue you. You are on your own. And life will get harder.
Look your challenge square in the eye, conceding your downward slide to oblivious darkness, and laugh at the pitiful disease, feeling sorry for its frustrated attempts to make your mood reflect the diseases actions. It sucks to have Parkinson’s. Imagine how bad it must feel to BE Parkinson’s.
Take pity on the disease, secure in the knowledge that your life matters, that despite FOMO and dwindling capabilities that you are alive and vibrant in this life.
Your purpose might be to get out of bed, if for no other reason than to taunt Parkinson’s in good natured frivolity in the realization that you are one step closer to getting the cosmic joke.