Parkinson’s did not check my ID. That was inconsiderate, because everybody else did.
The public picture of Parkinson’s is still an older man with a visible tremor. He is retired, silver-haired and staring bravely through a window while a brochure explains resilience in twelve-point font.
I was diagnosed at twenty-three.
I was in law school. My adult life was not winding down. It had barely finished clearing its throat. My early symptoms were rigidity, heaviness and a shorter stride—not the familiar shaking hand people had been trained to recognize.
From the outside, youth looked like evidence against the disease. Young bodies are supposed to be healthy, fast and temporarily indestructible. When something goes wrong, people reach for explanations that preserve that belief: stress, anxiety, an injury, exhaustion, anything except the neurological disease assigned to somebody else’s grandfather.
But age is a risk factor, not a security system. Young-onset Parkinson’s is Parkinson’s diagnosed before age fifty. The disease is less common there. Less common does not mean fictional. It means the person living it is more likely to enter every room looking like the exception that needs to defend itself.
That changes more than the medical conversation.
At twenty-three, Parkinson’s did not enter a finished life. It entered one still under construction. Education, work, money, relationships, independence and every plan that depended on a cooperative body were still being framed. The diagnosis did not interrupt retirement. It arrived before I had built the career I might eventually retire from.
People sometimes call that inspiring because they can see what came afterward: law school, a legal career, advocacy, books, testimony and decades of continuing. What they do not see is what it costs to make every ordinary milestone while carrying a disease everyone believes belongs later.
Young-onset Parkinson’s creates a strange isolation. You can be too young to feel represented in the waiting room and too medically complicated to feel represented among your peers. Conversations meant for older patients may assume a life stage you have not reached. Conversations among people your age may assume a body you no longer have.
Then comes the compliment: ‘You’re too young for Parkinson’s.’ It sounds sympathetic. It is also a useless little verdict. I was too young. Parkinson’s remained stubbornly unimpressed.
What needs to change begins with the picture. Clinicians, families, employers and the public need to understand that Parkinson’s can appear in younger adults and may not arrive wearing its most recognizable symptom. Age should inform attention, not cancel it.
Support also has to meet the life being lived. A younger person may need conversations about employment, family, finances, relationships and decades of treatment—not a smaller-print version of material designed around retirement.
Most of all, stop making young people earn belief by becoming visibly worse. Listen to what changed. Take the pattern seriously. Let the person be young and ill at the same time without treating those facts like opposing legal arguments.
TODAY’S DEFIANT TRUTH:
Parkinson’s didn’t check my ID.
Being too young for the stereotype never made me too young for the disease. Young is not immunity.
Widen the picture before another young person disappears outside the frame.
Live Defiantly. — Richie Pikunis