Simon Says...Time for Resilience

Parkinson’s is not a disease for the faint-hearted. When you get diagnosed with it you have been given a sucker-punch like never before, trust me. But what are you gonna do? For the newly diagnosed, it’s important to grieve for the likely able-bodied future you have lost, but over time, you have to accept your new reality and begin adapting to the new you.
Adapting to a PD diagnosis is far from easy, but doing so challenges you to see Parkinson’s as an outside phenomenon that does not define you. The more you see the disease as an external gatecrasher in your life, albeit a neurodegenerative one, the better you will feel. And the better you feel translates to more motivation to exercise, eat right, and stay connected socially. But Parkinson’s is a superhuman enemy, determined to fight you every step of the way, using one of its villainous superpowers, like apathy. It never relents, so you must never stop fighting it. They say no two Parkinson’s patients have the same presentation of the disease, but if there’s one common non-motor symptom that rears its head more than others, it’s apathy.

And if you’re doing battle with apathy, you’re going to need resilience.

Resilience isn’t a one-time thing. It’s your ability to absorb hits and bounce back over time. And trust me when I say there are going to be more and more opportunities to be resilient over the course of your disease. You get knocked down, but you get up again, and again and again. The more victories you have over apathy, the stronger your resilience will get. If you work hard enough at beating apathy, resilience becomes mental muscle-memory, and you won’t have to think when apathy strikes, you’ll just do.

Of course, Parkinson’s has other non-motor superpowers like depression, anxiety, fatigue, and poor sleep to throw into the mix, and it’s definitely willing to use these weapons to keep you under its thumb. Perhaps with the exception of sleeping issues, the others are closely tied to apathy, or can directly cause it.

Anthropomorphizing apathy and isolating it as a particularly virulent ‘enemy’ of PWPs is one technique you can use to help combat it. In other word,s you can visualize the battle as something like a tug of war. Or an arm-wrestle. Any simple, zero-sum contest will do.

If you suffer from apathy and its cousin, nihilism, when it comes to conquering it, the buck stops with you. Depending on your personality, the clash can be anything from a cakewalk in your favor to an epic David and Goliath confrontation.

It may or may not surprise you to learn that I am in my own titanic struggle with apathy. So far, apathy is winning, but I’m working hard to defeat it, and one of my weapons in the search for meaning is writing this column.

See you soon.