Humility is always a good thing. It's always a good thing to be humbled by circumstances so you can then come from a sincere place to try to deal with them.
I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?
The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.
I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson's community are just really happy that Parkinson's is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.
I didn't want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.
I don't have any affirmations, I don't have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities.
You've probably read in People that I'm a nice guy - but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson's, I wanted to kill him.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
Vanity's really overrated. When I was 20, teenage girls had my picture on the wall... I don't need to be pretty anymore. I just am who I am.
If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there's not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.
I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.
Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.
In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.
I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.
The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
If you asked my kids to describe me, they'd go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson's. And honestly, I don't think about it that much either. I talk about it because it's there, but it's not my totality.
I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.
