The following is an article written by Jeff Marshall for Parkinson’s Awareness Month in 2025.
I am a magician of sorts. Every day, I step into the world and perform a disappearing act. The audience—unsuspecting travellers, my employer, colleagues, the public—sees what they expect to see. A man in uniform. A professional. A set of steady hands.
But magic is about illusion, and illusions don’t last forever.
The Moment Everything Changed
The pill hit my tongue like a promise and a curse.
Within the hour, the tremors stopped. My balance returned. My body, stiff and sluggish for months, moved like it used to. And that’s when it hit me—the weight of it. That tiny pill had just told me everything I didn’t want to know. I had been searching for an answer to what was going on. That pill slammed the door shut. It had spoken.
I was 42 years old.
A Thief in the Dark
Parkinson’s doesn’t crash into your life all at once. It sneaks in, taking small things at first—the steadiness of a hand, the ease of tying a hook on your fishing line, the unconscious rhythm of walking. You don’t notice at first. You brush it off, make excuses. Until one day, you can’t.
What Is Parkinson’s?
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, which means it slowly damages the brain’s ability to control movement. It targets neurons in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, which produce dopamine—the chemical that allows muscles to move smoothly.
As those neurons die, the brain’s signals to the body start breaking down. Movements become stiff, slow, unpredictable. Tremors creep in. Muscles freeze. Even the simplest things—walking, buttoning a shirt, turning over in bed—become a challenge.
The disease moves at its own pace. Some people decline slowly over decades, others much faster. There’s no predicting how it will go. No cure. No way to stop it. Just treatments that can hold the symptoms at bay for a while.
The Invisible Battle
Most people don’t really understand Parkinson’s. They picture Michael J. Fox, the exaggerated movements, the uncontrollable jerks. But that’s not the disease—that’s dyskinesia, a side effect of long-term use of levodopa, the main medication for managing Parkinson’s symptoms.
My symptoms? They’re quieter. Crueller.
Dizziness that makes the world feel just slightly off-balance, like it’s shifting beneath me, never quite still. Fatigue so deep it feels like I’m walking against the river’s currents, that gravity itself has grown stronger. Muscles cramping up without warning. Your sense of smell slowly fades away. Anxiety, apathy, depression. The slow loss of small abilities no one notices until they’re gone.
How do you tell people you have a disease they can’t see? Don’t understand?
How do you say, I have Parkinson’s when all they picture is a frail old man or someone weaving and bobbing uncontrollably?
So I didn’t.
The Disappearing Act
I work in airport security. Strength, control, and confidence are the job.
It’s a demanding field where people expect you to be sharp, focused, and in control at all times. There’s no room for hesitation, no space for uncertainty. Travelers trust that you’re capable, that you can handle anything that comes your way. And I took pride in that.
So I became an expert at deception. I timed my pills like a secret agent, ensuring I was at my best when it mattered. I learned to mask the fatigue, the dizziness, the stiffness. If my hand twitches, I shove it in my pocket. If I stumbled, I played it off. If the pain made me wince, I blamed my back.
Parkinson’s doesn’t care about schedules. It doesn’t care about appearances. And it doesn’t stay hidden forever.
The moment I can’t hide it anymore isn’t just coming—
It’s closing in. I can feel it creeping closer with every shaky hand, every uncertain step. The time I have left to keep it hidden is running out.
Because the truth is, the weight of hiding it is heavier than the disease itself. Hiding takes work. Constant work. And the stress—it’s relentless. The fear that someone will notice. The effort to stay in control when my body has other plans. The mental strain of pretending everything is fine when my muscles are betraying me. All that energy spent trying to appear normal—when normal left me behind a long time ago.
So here it is. No more tricks. No more pretending.
No more hoping I can keep this part of my life in the shadows.
My name is Jeff Marshall, and I have Parkinson’s disease.
It’s not a weakness. It’s not a failure. It’s just the truth and I’m done hiding from it.