Why I Cried in a Chemist Car Park, and What Happened Next
I didn't expect to fall apart in a chemist car park.
I'd just left the psychiatrist's office, $2,000 lighter, holding a prescription I wasn't sure I was ready for, still half convinced he'd made some kind of administrative error about my entire personality.
I was 52 years old. And I had just been told I had ADHD. And OCPD. Two diagnoses I hadn't walked in expecting, for conditions I'd spent five decades living with without knowing they had names.
I drove to the chemist. I collected the medication. I bought a bottle of water.
I walked to my car. And I fell apart.
Not politely. Not briefly. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere deep and doesn't ask permission first.
The grief nobody warns you about
Everyone talks about the relief of a late ADHD diagnosis. And the relief was real, I won't pretend otherwise. Finally, a reason. A name for all of it. An explanation for the marriages and the businesses and the courses and the India trip and the forty-seven things I started and never finished.
But nobody warned me about the grief.
I cried for the girl who never knew. The one who could have finished a degree if someone had seen this in her at twenty. The one who might have understood why relationships felt so electric at the beginning and so suffocating when the novelty faded. The one who spent decades believing she was lazy, undisciplined, too much, when really, she just had a brain that had never been given a map.
I grieved for her properly. For the years lived in beautiful, expensive, exhausting chaos without ever understanding why.
And then, slowly, something shifted.
Me, coffee and about 47 thoughts running at once.
The other side of the car park
I sat in that car park for a long time.
And somewhere in the middle of all those tears I started to look back at my life differently. Not with shame, with something that felt, for the first time, like understanding.
The marriages weren't failure. They were a brain chasing dopamine, confusing the fading of novelty with the ending of love.
The unfinished courses weren't laziness. They were a brain addicted to beginnings, to that electric, full body yes of possibility before anything gets hard.
The chaos wasn't a character flaw. It was just my beautifully wired brain doing the only thing it knew how to do, without a diagnosis, without a framework, without anyone ever explaining how it actually worked.
I wasn't broken.
I never was.
I just didn't have the map.
What happened next
I went home. I took the first tablet the next morning. And I sat at my computer and focused for five hours straight, which, if you have ADHD, you will understand is nothing short of extraordinary.
And I started writing.
This blog. The book. All of it.
Because I figured if I'd spent 52 years not knowing, there had to be other women out there who didn't know either. Women who were told they were too much, too scattered, too intense. Women who had lived their whole lives slightly sideways and never understood why.
This is for them. For you.
You are not too much.
You are beautifully wired.
And if you're sitting in your own version of a chemist car park right now, I see you. I've been there. And I promise you, there is so much on the other side of it.
Yazz x
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This is what clarity feels like.
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The content on this website and in all Choose Your Next Life products and communications is based on the personal lived experience of Yasmin Wheatley. It is shared for informational and educational purposes only.
Nothing on this website constitutes medical, psychological, financial, legal or any other form of professional advice. Yasmin Wheatley is not a doctor, psychologist, therapist or licensed professional.
If you have concerns about your mental health, ADHD diagnosis, finances or any other personal matter, please seek advice from a qualified professional who can support your individual circumstances.
