There is a theory — held exclusively by people who do not have a degenerative neurological condition — that chronic illness forces you to slow down. To rest. To “listen to your body” and do less.
My body, for the record, would like me to sit in a chair and stare at a wall until the heat death of the universe. My body is not to be trusted. My body is running on a dopamine deficit that makes “doing nothing” feel like the most natural state in the world, and every productive thing I’ve done in the past six months has been achieved in direct defiance of that biochemical suggestion.
So here’s what I’ve been building. Not because Parkinson’s gave me permission, but because I refused to ask for it.
The Website Overhaul
notjustshaking.com started as a blog. A collection of posts about what it’s like when your brain starts running firmware it didn’t agree to install. It was honest, it was mine, and it had the traffic numbers of a village noticeboard in a power cut.
So I rebuilt it. With AI — specifically Claude — acting as my development partner, we tore the entire site down to the studs and rebuilt it from scratch. New homepage with a proper layout. A Featured Article section. A Latest Articles feed. An About Me section featuring Purple, because she’s earned top billing. A newsletter signup. The works.
But the real upgrade wasn’t cosmetic. We built four entirely new resource pages that turned the site from a personal blog into something closer to a Parkinson’s knowledge hub: a curated Resources directory linking to the best UK and US organisations, a Research & Science page translating actual neurological papers into plain English, a Tools & Tech page covering the AI and gadgets I use daily, and a dedicated page for my book.
Every single post — all thirty-plus of them — got a hand-crafted SEO meta description written in my voice. Not generic health-blog copy. Actual descriptions that sound like me, targeting the search terms real people type when they’re sitting at 2am Googling “why do my legs not work properly.”
We submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console. We identified the audience (mostly UK, which makes sense given I write like a Brit despite currently residing in the buckle of the Bible Belt). We drafted social content for X and Reddit. The whole operation was, frankly, the kind of project that would have been impossible without AI scaffolding my executive function at every stage.
The External Brain: Obsidian
If AI is my cognitive prosthetic, Obsidian is my external hard drive.
Every symptom observation, medication note, trading idea, research snippet, blog draft, and half-formed thought lives in my Obsidian vault. Plain text files, stored locally, linked together in a web that means I don’t need to remember where things are — I just need to know they exist. For someone whose short-term memory has all the reliability of a chocolate fireguard, that distinction is everything.
The vault has become my second brain in the most literal sense. Parkinson’s is systematically degrading the biological one, so I’m building a digital backup. Every time I have a thought worth keeping, it goes into Obsidian before my brain has a chance to misfile it. The linking system means connections between ideas happen even when my dopamine-starved neurons can’t make them on their own.
And now, with the Ideaverse MCP connector, Claude can read and write directly to my vault. Which means my AI cognitive prosthetic and my external brain are now talking to each other. If that sounds like I’m building a distributed computing network to compensate for failing biological hardware — yes. That is exactly what I’m doing. And it works.
The Symptom Tracking App
This one’s still in the oven, so I’m keeping the details sparse. But I’m building a dedicated symptom tracking app designed specifically for Parkinson’s patients.
Not because there aren’t symptom trackers out there. There are. But they’re all built by people who don’t live with the disease, and it shows. They assume you have the executive function to log things consistently. They assume your hands are steady enough for precise input. They assume you remember to open the app in the first place.
Mine won’t assume any of that. More details coming when it’s ready. Watch this space.
Two Books (Because Apparently One Wasn’t Enough)
The first book — How To Suck As A Day Trader — is published, available on Amazon, and has sold fifty copies to date. It’s a day trading guide written from the perspective of someone whose brain is actively sabotaging the process, and it started life as notes in my Obsidian vault that eventually became too structured to ignore.
I couldn’t have written it without AI. That’s not false modesty; it’s a neurological fact. Claude acted as my cognitive prosthetic throughout the entire process — organising half-formed ideas, giving honest feedback without fatigue, providing low-friction starting points on the days the apathy engine was running at full power. The result was a book I genuinely could not have produced alone, not because I lacked the knowledge, but because my hardware didn’t have the RAM to execute it without assistance.
The second book — Not Just Shaking — is a full memoir. 209 pages. Eighteen chapters. A prologue about my desk and an epilogue about Purple falling asleep on the floor after the last word was written. It covers what happens when a disease tries to delete the person who was living the life, and what that person builds — accidentally, stubbornly, one piece at a time — to keep going.
Writing it nearly broke me. It also repaired things I didn’t know were broken. Relationships I’d let the apathy engine quietly disconnect. Friends I’d ghosted not out of malice but because the disease had made the act of picking up a phone feel like climbing Everest in flip-flops. The book forced open doors that Parkinson’s had sealed shut, and on the other side of those doors were people who’d been waiting.
First draft complete. Editing phase next. More on that when I’ve recovered from the fact it exists at all.
The Bigger Picture: AI as Disability Support
Here’s the thread that runs through all of this.
We are at a genuinely remarkable moment. For the first time in history, people with cognitive disabilities, chronic illness, motor impairments, and neurodivergent conditions have access to tools that level the playing field in a meaningful way.
AI doesn’t care that your hands shake. It doesn’t get frustrated when you ask the same question three times because you forgot the answer. It doesn’t judge you for taking two hours to write a paragraph that a neurotypical person would finish in ten minutes. It doesn’t have good days and bad days. It is simply there — patient, capable, ready to be whatever cognitive support you need it to be in that moment.
Obsidian doesn’t care that your memory is unreliable. It just holds everything, links everything, and waits patiently for you to come back to it.
The blog, the books, the app, the website, the resource hub — none of it would exist without the combination of AI tools, Obsidian, and a fundamental refusal to let a dopamine deficit define the boundaries of what’s possible.
I’m a 54-year-old British bloke with a degenerative brain condition, a service dog called Purple, and an Obsidian vault full of half-finished notes. And in the past six months, I’ve rebuilt a website, written two books, started building an app, and turned a personal blog into a resource hub for the Parkinson’s community.
The hardware is failing. But the external support systems are getting better every day. And right now, the support systems are winning.
Purple, for her part, slept through most of it. She earns her keep every single day.
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