Larry Linton: Still Living With Parkinson's

06/03/2026

What If Nothing Needs to Be Fixed?

When I was first diagnosed with Parkinson's, I approached it the same way I approached most challenges in my life.

I tried to fix it. That sounds reasonable because that's how most of us are wired.

A problem appears. You gather information. Develop a strategy. Work harder. Push through. Find a solution.

That approach had always served me well throughout my life.

Professionally. Personally. Financially.

The approach was simple enough: When something wasn't working, you figured it out. So, I naturally assumed the same rules applied when Parkinson's arrived.

I turned Parkinson's into a project. Another problem to solve. Yet another challenge to overcome. One more puzzle to solve.

In doing every symptom required attention. Every setback demanded action. Every new development triggered another round of research, planning, and analysis.

I was constantly asking:

What should I do next?
What am I missing?
How do I stop this?
How do I get back to where I was?

The assumption behind every question was the same:

Something is broken. And my job is to fix it.

Parkinson's doesn't always cooperate with that mindset. Some things improve. Some things adapt. Some things simply become part of your new reality.

And over time, I began to notice something.

The effort required to constantly "fix" my life was becoming exhausting.

Physically. Emotionally. Every day became a need for fresh evaluation. A new measurement.
A comparison.

Am I worse?
Am I progressing?
Am I declining?
Am I winning?
Am I losing?

Living that way creates a tremendous amount of pressure.

But eventually (and thankfully) the question began to change.

Instead of asking:

"How do I fix this?"

I found myself asking:

"How do I live with this?"

At first, that felt uncomfortable.

Dangerously close to giving up. But equally, dangerously close to acceptance. And at the early stage of my journey, I still confused the two.

But they are not the same thing.

Giving up says:

"There is no point."

Acceptance says:

"This is where I am. Now what?"

One closes the door. The other opens it.

That distinction changed everything.

Because once I stopped trying to repair every aspect of my life, I could finally begin participating in it again.

Ironically, many of the best things that happened after my diagnosis occurred after I stopped obsessing over fixing Parkinson's.

Running.
Cycling.
Returning to drumming.
Reaching the professional milestone of Partner admission.
Writing.
Building friendships.

None of those experiences happened because I overcame or fixed Parkinson's. They happened because I have learned how to live alongside it.

At first, I thought the goal was to eliminate every obstacle. Now I think the goal is to build a meaningful life despite them.

That is a very different objective. And a far more achievable one.

Because life has never required perfection in order to be meaningful.

A Final Thought

I'm not suggesting we stop exercising. Or stop learning. Or stop pursuing treatments, therapies, and opportunities to improve our health.

Far from it.

But perhaps there is freedom in recognizing that not everything needs to be fixed before life can begin again.

Perhaps some things need to be understood.

Adapted to. Worked around. Lived with.

For years, I thought my job was to fix Parkinson's. Now I think my job is something else entirely.

To continue building a life that remains meaningful, purposeful, and rewarding—even in its presence.

And strangely enough, that approach has brought me far more peace than all the years I spent trying to repair what could not be repaired.

05/29/2026

From Online Conversations to Real Conversations

I have just returned from attending the World Parkinson Congress in Phoenix.

And like many meaningful experiences in life, it is difficult to fully capture in a few words.

Yes, there were exceptional speakers.

Important research.

Insightful discussions about treatment, exercise, cognition, advocacy, and the future of Parkinson's disease care.

But for me, the most meaningful part of the Congress was something much simpler:

People.

One of the strange things about Parkinson’s is that while every journey is unique, there is also an immediate understanding between people living with it.

Certain things do not require lengthy explanation.

The uncertainty.
The adaptation.
The humor.
The frustration.
The resilience.

People simply understand.

And there is something incredibly powerful about being surrounded by thousands of individuals who all, in one way or another, are navigating similar realities.

Over the past year, writing these blogs and engaging with this community has created many meaningful conversations.

Messages exchanged late at night.

Shared stories.

Encouragement.

Support.

People reaching out from across North America and beyond.

Phoenix gave many of those conversations a face and a voice.

People I had only known through comments, messages, or shared experiences suddenly became real-life conversations over coffee, in hallways, between sessions, or while walking through the conference center.

That was special.

Very special.

One of the unexpected gifts of Parkinson’s has been the relationships that emerge through shared vulnerability.

Not superficial networking.

Real connection.

The kind that forms when people speak honestly about fear, identity, uncertainty, adaptation, and hope.

The Congress created space for those conversations everywhere.

Not only during formal sessions—

but between them.

In elevators.
At dinners.
Walking to events.
Laughing about symptoms.
Sharing experiences that only others living this journey truly understand.

What also struck me was how much deeper certain relationships became simply by spending time together in person.

There is something different about sitting across from someone, hearing their story directly, watching their expressions, hearing their laughter, and realizing how much strength people quietly carry every day.

It reminded me that while Parkinson’s can sometimes feel isolating, community changes the experience profoundly.

Not because it removes the challenges.

But because it reminds you that you are not carrying them alone.

Ironically, one of the most inspiring parts of the Congress was not the science.

It was the people.

People are continuing to move forward despite uncertainty.

People adapting creatively and courageously.

People finding meaning, humor, advocacy, purpose, and connection within lives they never expected to be living.

That kind of resilience is difficult to put into words.

But once you witness it, it stays with you.

A Final Thought

When I was first diagnosed, I thought Parkinson’s would slowly make my world smaller.

In some ways, it has changed it.

But experiences like the World Parkinson Congress remind me that it has also expanded it in unexpected ways.

New conversations.
New friendships.
New perspectives.
New purpose.

And perhaps one of the most important lessons I carried home from Phoenix is this:

Community matters.

Deeply.

Because while Parkinson’s may be part of our individual stories—

None of us were ever meant to navigate it entirely alone.

05/23/2026

From Isolation to Phoenix

If you had told me ten years ago that I would one day be attending the World Parkinson’s Congress in Phoenix, I likely would not have believed you.

Not for a second.

Ten years ago my world was very small.

Not just physically.

Emotionally.

Mentally.

Socially.

At first, Parkinson’s felt isolating.

It felt like something happening to me.

Something I had to quietly carry.

Something I needed to figure out mostly on my own.

Over time, something changed.

Not the diagnosis.

Not the reality of Parkinson’s.

But my relationship with it.

What started as surviving slowly became adapting.

Then engaging.

Then connecting.

I returned to running.

I got back on my road bike.

I found my way back to drumming.

I continued to grow professionally.

I began writing.

And through writing, something unexpected happened—

community.

Messages.

Conversations.

Shared experiences.

People reaching out from different places, all carrying their own version of uncertainty, resilience, fear, humor, and hope.

That reminded me of something powerful:

Parkinson’s can feel deeply personal.

But none of us are entirely alone in it.

That is why attending the World Parkinson’s Congress in Phoenix feels especially meaningful.

Not simply because it is a conference.

But because it represents something much bigger.

A gathering of people connected by lived experience, science, advocacy, curiosity, research, adaptation, and hope.

People living with Parkinson’s.

Care partners.

Researchers.

Clinicians.

Advocates.

Voices from all over the world coming together around one shared reality.

For me, it feels like another reminder of just how far this journey has taken me.

From isolation—

to community.

From fear—

to perspective.

From asking “Why me?”

to asking, “How do I keep moving forward?”

A Final Thought

If Parkinson’s has taught me anything, it is that connection matters.

Sometimes deeply.

And while every journey is different, there is something incredibly powerful about meeting people who simply understand.

So if you are attending the World Parkinson’s Congress in Phoenix, I would genuinely love to connect.

Please feel free to reach out.

It would be an honor to meet some of the very people whose stories, courage, humor, and resilience continue to inspire me every day.

Because one of the most meaningful things Parkinson’s has given me—

unexpectedly—

is community.

And perhaps Phoenix is simply another chapter in that story.

💬 If you’re attending the World Parkinson’s Congress in Phoenix, send me a message. I’d love the opportunity to connect in person.

05/19/2026

What I Would Tell My Younger Self

If I could sit down with my younger self, I’m not sure he would recognize me right away.

Not because I look dramatically different.

But because life has changed me in ways I never expected.

He would probably not see a tremor.

But he would notice the slower pace.

Maybe he'd even recognize a little more gray hair and a few more hard-earned lines on my face.

But what he would not immediately see is perspective.

That took time.

I would tell him this:

You are going to face things you never planned for.

Life will not unfold exactly the way you expect.

Some chapters will arrive without warning.

And some of the hardest ones will ask more of you than you think you can give.

But keep going.

Because you are stronger than you realize.

When I was younger, I thought stability was the goal.

Predictability.

Momentum.

Control.

I believed a good life meant staying on course.

But life rarely unfolds in straight lines.

I would tell him not to fear change so much.

Because some of life’s deepest lessons come from the chapters you never wanted to write.

For a long time, I measured life by achievement.

Career milestones.
Productivity.
Momentum.
The next professional goal.

And while those things mattered, they were never the full story.

I would tell him:

Do not confuse achievement with meaning.

They are not always the same thing.

At some point, life will introduce you to Parkinson's disease.

You will not welcome it.

At first, it will frighten you more than you want to admit.

You will feel uncertain.

Withdrawn.

At times, I'm convinced life is shrinking.

But hear this carefully:

It will change your life.

It will not end it.

I would tell him that even after diagnosis,

You will run four half-marathons.
You will ride your road bike 7,000 kilometers in a year—more than once.
You will return to drumming.
You will learn to play the congas.
You will perform at the internationally renowned Beaches International Jazz Festival.
You will continue growing professionally.
You will write.
You will connect.
You will still build meaningful things.

And perhaps most surprisingly—

You will discover parts of yourself you had not yet met.

At first, you will think strength means pushing harder.

Later, you will understand it differently.

Strength will look like:

adapting
pacing
honesty
humility
continuing
beginning again

Not dramatic courage.

Quiet courage.

The kind that rarely gets applause.

Do not spend too much time trying to become who you once were.

Life will ask you to become someone new.

Let it be.

That is not failure.

That is growth.

A Final Thought

If I could speak to my younger self, I would probably tell him many things.

But perhaps most of all, I would tell him this:

You are going to live through difficult chapters.

But they will not define the whole book.

There will still be laughter.
Music.
Fear.
Growth.
Meaning.
Connection.
Purpose.

And one day, you will realize that the life you feared was ending—

was still unfolding.

Just differently.

And perhaps, in some ways—

more deeply than you ever imagined.

05/17/2026

05/15/2026

The Grief No One Talks About

When most people think about grief, they think about losing someone.

A moment.

A funeral.

An ending that is visible and clearly defined.

But there is another kind of grief that rarely gets discussed.

The grief of realizing your life may not unfold the way you once imagined it would.

That grief is quieter.

More private.

And in many ways, more complicated.

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, there was no single catastrophic moment.

No dramatic collapse.

Life continued.

I still went to work.
Still paid bills.
Still showed up.

From the outside, much of life looked the same.

But internally, something profound had shifted.

The future I had unconsciously assumed would happen no longer felt certain.

And that realization carries its own kind of grief.

What makes this kind of grief so difficult is that you are not grieving something that has already occurred.

You are grieving possibilities.

Assumptions.

Expectations.

The version of life you quietly believed would unfold without interruption.

That’s difficult to explain to people.

Because nothing visible has necessarily been lost yet.

And yet internally, it can feel as though everything has changed.

In the early years especially, I spent a great deal of time mourning things that had not actually happened.

I feared the loss of independence.
The loss of identity.
The loss of purpose.
The loss of the life I thought I knew.

At 49 years old, I genuinely believed many of my best experiences were already behind me.

I did not yet understand how much fear distorts perspective.

One of the hardest lessons I learned is that the mind often grieves imagined futures as though they are already real.

And when you live inside those imagined futures long enough, they begin shaping your present.

That happened to me.

I became withdrawn.
Anxious.
Consumed by worst-case scenarios.

Not because those things had happened—

but because I believed they inevitably would.

What time eventually taught me is that grief and growth are not mutually exclusive.

You can grieve what has changed while still building a meaningful life.

That realization took years for me to fully understand.

Because in the beginning, I thought adaptation somehow meant denial.

That if I acknowledged joy, purpose, achievement, or growth, I was minimizing the seriousness of Parkinson’s.

But life is rarely that binary.

What surprised me most was not simply that life continued.

It was that meaningful things continued too.

Running.
Drumming.
Professional achievement.
Writing.
Connection.
Purpose.

Not despite Parkinson’s always being present—

but alongside it.

That distinction matters.

Even now, grief still appears occasionally.

Not dramatically.

More subtly.

In moments of comparison.
In reminders of change.
In recognizing new limitations.

But it no longer defines the entire landscape.

Because over time, something else grew beside it:

Perspective.

I once believed Parkinson’s would slowly take my life away from me.

What I didn’t understand was that while some things would change, other things would deepen.

My appreciation of time.
My understanding of resilience.
My relationships.
My ability to listen.
My sense of purpose.

None of those things were part of the life I imagined before diagnosis.

But they became part of the life I actually built afterward.

A Final Thought

The grief that comes with chronic illness is real.

But so is the possibility that life can still contain meaning, growth, connection, and joy afterward.

Not the same life.

But not necessarily an empty one either.

And perhaps one of the hardest — and most important — things to learn is this:

You can mourn what changed without losing the ability to appreciate what remains.

05/13/2026

The Difference Between Acceptance and Giving Up

One of the things I struggled with most after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease was the idea of acceptance.

At the time, acceptance felt dangerously close to surrender.

As though acknowledging the reality of Parkinson’s somehow meant I was giving up on myself.

Giving up on my future.
Giving up on ambition.
Giving up on the life I thought I was still supposed to have.

So I resisted it.

Completely.

In the beginning, my relationship with Parkinson’s was adversarial.

I viewed it as something to defeat.

Something to outrun.

Something that could perhaps be ignored if I worked hard enough, stayed productive enough, or remained mentally strong enough.

I pushed.

Hard.

Sometimes that helped.

Sometimes it didn’t.

But underneath all of it was fear.

Because what I called “fighting” was often just another way of refusing to acknowledge that life had changed.

At the time, acceptance sounded passive.

Defeated.

Like lowering your expectations and quietly stepping away from the life you wanted.

And I wanted no part of that.

I suspect many people living with chronic illness feel the same way.

We are conditioned to believe that strength means resistance.

That perseverance means constant forward pressure.

That stopping to acknowledge limitation somehow equals weakness.

Over time, though, something became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Reality does not negotiate.

Ignoring Parkinson’s did not stop it from existing.

Pretending nothing had changed did not reduce the energy required to manage it.

If anything, resistance was exhausting me more than the condition itself.

What slowly changed was not my determination.

It was my understanding.

I began to realize that acceptance is not the abandonment of hope.

It is the abandonment of denial.

And those are very different things.

Acceptance does not mean:
“I stop trying.”

It means:
“I stop fighting reality.”

That distinction changed everything for me.

Because once you stop spending energy arguing with what is real, you can begin using that energy more constructively.

You adapt.

You plan differently.

You pace yourself differently.

You redefine success differently.

Not because ambition disappears.

But because sustainability starts to matter too.

Acceptance is not dramatic.

It doesn’t arrive all at once.

It looks more like small moments of honesty.

Recognizing when you need rest.
Acknowledging that some things now require adaptation.
Understanding that pushing harder is not always the same thing as moving forward.

It also means allowing yourself to continue building a meaningful life—even in the presence of uncertainty.

People sometimes assume acceptance means lowering expectations.

I no longer see it that way.

In many respects, acceptance allowed me to do more.

Not less.

Because once I stopped trying to prove that Parkinson’s had changed nothing, I became more capable of working with the life I actually had.

And strangely enough, that life became fuller again.

Running.
Drumming.
Writing.
Connecting.
Continuing to grow professionally and personally.

None of those things emerged from denial.

They emerged from adaptation.

A Final Thought

Giving up says:
“Nothing meaningful is possible anymore.”

Acceptance says:
“Life is different now. How do I continue meaningfully within that reality?”

Those are not the same thing.

Not even close.

Acceptance did not reduce my ambition.

It changed how I pursued it.

And perhaps more importantly—

it allowed me to finally move forward instead of spending all my energy trying to move backward.

05/12/2026

The Conversations I Didn’t Expect

Over the past year, something unexpected has happened.

What started as a few reflections about living with Parkinson's disease slowly turned into conversations.

Then messages.

Then longer discussions.

People reaching out about:

diagnosis
disclosure
disability claims
work
identity
fear
adjustment
uncertainty

At first, I thought I was simply sharing my own experience.

Trying to make sense of it.

Trying to put words around things that often feel difficult to explain.

I never imagined that these reflections would resonate beyond my own situation.

But over time, something became increasingly clear.

People weren’t just responding to the stories themselves.

They were responding to recognition.

Although every situation is different, the themes are remarkably similar.

The uncertainty after diagnosis.
The fear of what comes next.
The tension around disclosure in the workplace.
The quiet grief that accompanies change.
The challenge of adapting while trying to preserve identity.

Again and again, I found myself having conversations that moved beyond information.

People were not simply asking
“What should I do?”

More often, they were asking something deeper:

“How do I live with this?”
“How do I navigate this professionally?”
“How do I continue to move forward when life no longer feels predictable?”

Those are very different questions.

And they rarely have simple answers.

One of the things I’ve learned is that expertise matters.

Professional guidance matters.

Medical guidance matters.

Legal guidance matters.

But lived experience matters too.

Because there is a difference between understanding something intellectually and understanding what it feels like to carry it into your everyday life.

The conversations that stayed with me most were rarely about technical details.

They were about:

fear
identity
confidence
adaptation
uncertainty
resilience

Things that are deeply human.

As these conversations continued, I started recognizing something in myself as well.

The person I was ten years ago would not have been capable of having these discussions.

At that stage, I was still overwhelmed by my own fears and uncertainty.

Still trying to convince myself that life was not over.

But experience changes you.

Not perfectly.

And not all at once.

But gradually.

You begin to understand things differently.

You become less focused on “fixing” everything and more focused on learning how to navigate what is in front of you.

And perhaps most importantly, you learn how valuable it is when someone truly understands what you are trying to say—even when you are struggling to say it yourself.

Eventually, I had to acknowledge something I had not anticipated.

These conversations had become meaningful not only to others—

but to me.

Because they reminded me that difficult experiences can still produce something useful.

Perspective.
Connection.
Guidance.
Understanding.

Not because anyone becomes an expert in suffering.

But because lived experience creates insight that cannot always be learned from a textbook.

For most of my professional life, my work focused on solving problems.

Providing answers.

Creating clarity.

What surprised me was realizing that this next chapter may not be about providing answers at all.

It may be about helping people navigate uncertainty more confidently.

Helping them feel less isolated.

Helping them adapt without losing themselves in the process.

I didn’t set out to build any of this.

I certainly didn’t expect Parkinson’s to lead me here.

But sometimes the most meaningful chapters of our lives begin quietly.

A conversation.
A message.
A shared experience.

And over time, those moments begin to point toward something larger.

Perhaps that’s what has been happening here all along.