It’s easy to believe that optimism is the most important thing we can carry through a hard life. A good attitude. A positive mindset. The ability to look on the bright side and keep smiling no matter what.

Young onset Parkinson’s cured me of that belief.

Living with YOPD means waking up each day to a body that is unreliable in ways most people never have to think about. It means planning meals around medication absorption, calculating energy like currency, it is a grief that arrives uninvited—sometimes quietly, sometimes like a wave that knocks the breath out of you.

But resilience doesn’t require denial. It doesn’t ask me to pretend this is easy or fair. It simply asks me to stay.

Endurance is getting up on the days when we don’t feel brave or inspired. It’s showing up without the promise of progress, learning how to rest without guilt and how to fight without spectacle. It’s understanding that strength doesn’t always look like momentum—sometimes it looks like survival, plain and simple.

There is a quiet heroism in continuing.

Resilience lives in contradictions- it lives in choosing joy when it’s available and neutrality when it’s not. It lives in laughing at the absurdity of your body betraying you before midlife. It lives in advocacy, in honesty, in refusing to shrink yourself to make others comfortable with your disease.isn’t about “staying positive.”l abostaying real.

Resilience means letting go of who we were supposed to be and learning how to be who we are now—again and again, adjusting without surrendering. understanding that survival can be an act of rebellion.

And yes, there are moments of beauty here. There is connection, depth, a kind of clarity that only comes when life strips away the illusion of control. But those moments are not proof that Parkinson’s is a gift but that humans are resilient beyond what we ever imagine.

I don’t live this life because I’m optimistic.

Some days, that is more than enough.