Michael Jay Fox Learns from the Harder Things

“The tools that worked for quitting drinking work even better for this, which are: acceptance and surrender. Not like, ‘I give up, I quit,’ but you just say, ‘Okay, I cede you the big points.’ With Parkinson’s, I’d reached a détente with it. An understanding. It was like, ‘You can take up this space, just leave me this space. And as it continues to shrink this space, I’ll find better ways to use it.’ And I was fine with that.”

“I can normalize everything. I can make like it’s all normal, like it just is what it is. And then sometimes I get moments when I think, This isn’t normal. This sucks. But then to have someone say, ‘That’s normal. And I’m okay with that.’ Oh, okay—she says it’s normal, and she’s okay with it. So let me rethink it. It’s kinda like if you’re walking along with someone and you’re wearing a silly hat, and you look over and they’ve got a silly hat on, too, you go, ‘Ah! Regardless of what anyone else thinks, we both think this silly-hat thing works.’ Just to have a comrade. It’s so much more complicated than ‘It’s a great marriage.’ It’s a great understanding. It depends on mutual goodwill and mutual love and mutual concern.”

“If you wish certain things in your life away, you don’t know what else you’re wishing away. If this hadn’t happened, so many other things might not have happened. We might not have all of the children that we have, or we may have—it’s just so hard to wish any part of it away. Even the hard things, because we learn so much from the harder things.”