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hi elizabeth >Every night I sit at my PC and visit with my new found friends. i know the feeling! whaddya mean, every night? how about morning, noon and night? [just joking! - hah!] my isle-olation makes all of you, new and not-so-new, important to me and there's something about communicating with other via e-mail that is unique: there is nothing visual to confuse the message: it is 'pure' no 'looks' 'appearance' 'lifestyle' 'wealth' 'poverty' issues no gender [if concealed, either deliberately or not] no nationality no race no accent no 'disabilities' just the words that you are motivated to tap out on the keyboard; which brings me to your message; these words of yours jumped out at me first: >...more and more I am beginning to feel that I have no business >even telling my friends that I have PD ...I have very little tremmor >which is my only symptom that anyone else could see second: >The only real problem is my great difficulty in sleeping. third: >I am affraid I am giving the wrong impression of what PD really is. >Here again I am affraid I am not relating how I feel about this. one of the reasons i keep referring to grace in my various posts is due to a lot of reading i have done over the past several years [to name some names - peck, jung, zukav, mitchell, faludi, burns, steinem] the concept of 'coincidence' or 'moments of grace' drew me quite strongly because i could relate to it so clearly in scott peck's description of these moments, he described them as all around us all the time; it just takes a little shift in awareness to see them. his analogy was: [ono, another automobile analogy!] "you know when you buy a volkswagen and suddenly every second car on the road seems to be a volkswagen?" is fairly close to the way he describes it. as the former owner of a white vw van i instantly knew what he meant. we all experience coincidence and most of us probably shrug it off as 'pure chance' i cannot do that any longer where am i going with this? just replace 'volkswagen' with 'clinical depression' in the above analogy i am very conscious of the possiblity of over-kill here 'there's no patriot like a converted patriot' [or something like that] and i am still in the process of shedding a 'ms-fix-it' role which i loved to cling to: "hey, i see this problem - here, let me help you with that!" no-one can 'fix' me but me no-one can 'fix' you but you but [you knew this was coming, didn't you?] in the same way that i can listen to someone's description of medications and then, in response to a plea for help, i can toss in my opinion for whatever it may be worth i can interpret your words as a description of symptoms and the fact of your message as a request for input so for what it's worth from a 'layparkie' viewpoint coloured by my personal experiences, of course the 'first', 'second', and 'third' excerpts from your message all appear to my eyes to be negative distorted thinking [those 'automatic thought' monkeys] and therefore, probably, symptoms of cd it is extremely common [especially in parkies] and is extremely commonly under-treated [especially in parkies] i feel like i am living proof i've been 'communicating' like a mad fool recently because that's the way 'i' am 'normally' i have always valued solitude but the non-communicating 'hermit' created by cd in me is a fraud a house of cards structure built on distortion and false perceptions and, like the volkswagens, the more i learn about it the more i see it for whatever it's worth with love from your syber-sis janet [log in to unmask]