All in a pickle 🥒

Where Emma has a guest

Hello! Normal service has resumed here after a mad week of birthdays. Yes, I very cleverly managed to have my two daughter’s born on the same day...4 years apart! You can read all about that special chaos here.

🎶You've gotta dill with it…

This week

I have a very special guest here to share some thoughts about PD and sex. The exceptionally funny, talented and frankly gorgeous

Jennifer Sullivan

from The Dill Pickle. Not only does she write these superb letters but she has just finished her memoir and is on the hunt for an agent - I know this memoir will be brilliant so someone get in there and sign her up! She also runs the Wiggles Project dedicated to providing video content for us Parkinson’s folks.

Do enjoy this taster of Jen’s writing:

The inspiration for The Dill Pickle, my Substack about Parkinson's, sex, and relationships, is my interest in exploring topics typically tricky for people to discuss. I am hoping for it to be an advice column for people with Parkinson's to ask the questions they don't dare to ask about sex. Maybe then it shouldn't be a surprise that few have dared to message me. I either need to rethink my idea, or people need to start sending some sex or relationship questions. So far, I have been coming up with topics inspired by my own life with Parkinson's love struggles or from articles I read. 

I am not a sex expert. I am just a woman with Parkinson's who is borderline obsessed with sex. Because I love it, and as menopause looms only a few years away and as I fear what Parkinson's will do to my sex drive, I want to find solutions, perspectives, and anything that will help me get through what I fear but am uncertain will materialize. Anything that will keep my sex life going. 

If I get to the place where it's time to wave the white flag of sex life death, then what? I will still want answers and solutions and a way to laugh. It seems like an indulgent first-world problem, but our need for human connection is biological and psychological; it's universal. For each of us, sex ranks on our priority list in different places. My sex importance ranking happens to be high at the moment, but as we all know, things change. 

I love Jennifer highlighting the unpredictability of our changing bodies and brains.

Of course, I hear you cry, that’s life!

Well, yes. Commonly known as the spice of life - change is a natural event. But change in PD and chronic illness can be an abrupt and rude awakening. A headlong crash into austerity where everything is suddenly ripped away. Gradual decline most of us expect and accept but it’s a real toughy to cope with complete collapse.

We all want to decline on our own terms hopefully still laughing and having great sex along the way!

Do sign up to The Dill Pickle as the archive is stuffed with great reads.

with love

E xx

P.S. If you would like to guest post here hit reply, I’d love to hear from you!