I have spent years comparing myself to a man who no longer exists.
He moved faster. He had more energy. He could leave the house without conducting a full neurological risk assessment involving medication, timing, bathrooms, balance and whether his body planned to stage a coup somewhere near the produce aisle.
In my memory, that man was efficient, fearless and apparently never tired. Memory is generous that way. It removes the confusion, the bad decisions, the insecurity and every afternoon he wasted doing absolutely nothing, then hands me the edited highlight reel as evidence that I am falling behind.
That is a hell of a trial to put yourself through, especially when the prosecution is using nostalgia as its star witness.
Parkinson’s changes the conditions of a life. It changes speed, stamina, attention, confidence, planning and sometimes the very identity you spent years building. The mistake is believing the only acceptable response is to reproduce the old life under entirely different neurological circumstances.
I understand the grief. I have lived with this disease for thirty-five years. There are versions of me I miss deeply, including some I did not appreciate while I was busy being them. There were things I could do without thinking that now require strategy, patience or help. Pretending that loss does not hurt would not be resilience. It would be bullshit with better lighting.
But grief becomes cruel when it turns the past into a performance standard.
The man I was did not have to carry what I carry now. He did not know what dopamine agonist withdrawal could do to a mind. He had not spent nine hours in brain surgery, watched treatments stop working, rebuilt his life around a pump or learned how many times a person can lose certainty without losing himself.
He had strengths I miss. I have strengths he never needed.
That matters.
I am not a failed copy of my younger self. I am the current version of a life that kept moving through conditions the original version never had to face.
Maybe I do less in a day. Maybe I need more recovery, more planning or a different route. That does not automatically mean I have become less. It means the arithmetic changed, and I am finally learning not to grade myself with an answer key written for a different exam.
There is nothing wrong with missing who you were. Visit the memories. Tell the stories. Mourn what deserves to be mourned.
Just do not build a permanent courtroom there.
TODAY’S DEFIANT TRUTH:
Stop measuring your life against a version of you who no longer exists.
You are not behind that person. You are carrying a different weight through a different life, and you are still here making something human out of it.
The conditions changed.
So did you.
Live Defiantly. — Richie Pikunis