I want to talk about a point made in yesterday’s post; the one about you are greater than your diagnosis! I’ve often thought of myself or even others in a single minded fashion. I’ve said to myself: I’m a country boy, or I’m a singer, or I’m an animal lover. Lord knows, I’ve said a lot of other things about myself that aren’t so flattering too. None of those things define me or who I am. They have each had a role to play in the way I have chosen to navigate life, but they have not defined the sum of who I am. Likewise, PD does not fill this jar of clay called Tom to the exclusion of all else. There is much, much more to me (or others) than a few dead cells in the substantia nigra resulting in diminished dopamine.<\/p>\n
Early in the diagnosis, I was emotionally consumed with what it meant (more of what it didn’t mean, but what I thought) to have PD. This added to my grief, which has to be experienced, but it went far beyond that grief. I was perched precariously on the precipice of personal pronunciation that I was a victim of Parkinson’s disease. Then I went even further to define what that must be in me. It wasn’t enough that there had been a diagnosis of PD, I was about to have that define me. Fortunately, that misguided tour was short lived and I returned to the land of get a grip. The map of that terrain is drawn from well documented travels over many hills and through numerous valleys, none of which have been a destination called Tom. These are a part of the intricate tapestry that is me. Leaving the prison of singular definition is taking a deep breath in the air of endless possibilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I want to talk about a point made in yesterday’s post; the one about you are greater than your diagnosis! I’ve often thought of myself or even others in a single minded fashion. I’ve said to myself: I’m a country boy, or I’m a singer, or I’m an animal lover. Lord knows, I’ve said a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parkinsons-disease-rants-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":981,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions\/981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-thrivalist.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}