by Ian Temple
Fourteen years ago, a neurologist told me: “You have Parkinson’s.” I remember his face before I remember his words: calm, certain, kind. Parkinson’s: a progressive neurological disease. No cure. In my mind, it was an old person’s disease. Something that happened to other people, later in life. Not to a single man in his early 50s who believed there was still time for romance, adventure, reinvention.
What terrified me most wasn’t the tremors or the stiffness. It was the imagined future. I pictured a partner signing up not for love, but for care. I thought: who would choose that? Who would choose me, knowing this?
So, I hid. I’d had some practice: as a gay man who grew up when being out was dangerous, and later as a man living with HIV, I understood the choreography of concealment. You measure the room. You decide who is safe. You disclose carefully because you can never unring a bell.
In the beginning, it was easy enough. A slight shuffle could be brushed off, slower movements blamed on stress. But hiding has a cost. It shrinks your world. And Parkinson’s thrives when you withdraw, when you decide it’s easier not to go out, not to explain, not to be seen moving differently.