Pear Pressure 💎

Where Emma feels the pressure

Hello, you delightful lot! Thank you for the messages of support in my decluttering mission, I’m chuffed so many of you resonated with my cause!

As discovered in my last letter summer can be taxing. Not least because I feel marginally better due to the warmth and do far too much - aka decluttering etc.

I ’might’ have done too much.

“Ah, yes, Emma, we knew this would happen.”

Thank you, sage readers.

Yes, I have a habit of doing too much. I had an update on my broken wrist and have a whole delightful regime of physio to wrestle with. The most salient advice is: no load bearing and don’t overuse it.

Ahhh.

That means reordering the whole house, right?

Oops.

Yeah, that is how I have always been, ask my mother. (Sorry, Ma)

Aside from my proclivities for self-torture, there is another aspect at play. The sensation that our lack of dopamine removes the natural ability to put the stops on or resist stress, pressure and the nagging ‘have to’ voice.

Much of Parkinson’s is an exercise in excess; excess movement, excess rigidity, excess apathy, excess susceptibility to stress and environmental overload. Even the drugs we take are all about excess. We need so much to even dent the surface of the symptoms and many of the drugs push us to excess by stimulating compulsive behaviours. As always PD is a contradictory bugger - half the disease is action, half comatose. The party is made especially wild with these aspects being unpredictable and spontaneous.

My reaction is to umm overreact, it goes something like this:

Wakes up.

Tentative stretch, ow, urg, can’t...turn…over…damn need pee.

Manage to make it for a pee.

Have coffee¹

Read newsletter messages ;)

Ahhhh I feel less um Parky today than usual.

Quick!² Do EVERYTHING!!

There is such an internal pressure to grab the moment before I am rendered defunct. The ongoing feud in my brain between apathy and a vague impetus to even give a shit about action drives this pressure.

In some ways this ‘pressure’ is good, in others it simply results in over-exhaustion. Yet again you can’t win with PD!

I think the other truth is the sensation that one day I won’t be able to do anything so I had best grab the opportunity while I can. That is a peculiar motivator and depressor at the same time. There we go again - everything is a contradiction.

I am sure I will achieve the balance one day, only my balance is fucked and I don’t exactly have a history of taking it easy.

Let me know about your pressure moments.

with love

E x

P.S. I am writing the WSMD book…you can read more about it here & become a paying subscriber for special extracts, mini-chapters and things.

1. Readers, I live a blessed life and my coffee arrives fresh from our ridiculously chic Gaggia machine - R is a coffee-making god.

2. Quick is a relative term in Parkinson’s - anything between a snail’s pace and the tortoise amble.