About Me — Daniel McIntosh

Who I am and who I want to be.

If you are making the effort to read my words, I suppose I owe you an introduction. But where to begin? I suppose I could tell you I’m a retired professor of international relations. Retirement wasn’t my choice: I have Parkinson’s disease, and I grew too exhausted to teach four classes, three times a week, plus all the committee meetings and administrative assignments and office hours and research and writing and peer review (of me and by me) that goes with the job. For a couple of years before my diagnosis, I’d push myself to go to class (or the meeting, or whatever), return to my office, and collapse on the floor, trying to get enough sleep that I could rouse myself at the alarm to get up and do it again. All that ended, finally, when I literally could not get myself off the floor and go to the next class.

So one thing you can say is I’m stubborn. I’d already grown up fighting with my body (rheumatic heart disease, if anyone knows what that is), pushing it to do things it wasn’t inclined to do. What’s a little more exhaustion on top of that? I told myself it was just a matter of willpower (much as I did when I grew up with depression, something that has always been in the background — especially before I was introduced to antidepressant medications in my early thirties). With “just a little more effort” I wrote a dissertation, worked as an…