If he has a panel van, I’m not going.

Hiya,

I was standing in my parents' kitchen when I heard the car pull up the driveway.

I turned to my mum and said:if he has a panel van, I'm not going.

This was 1994. No Instagram. No profiles. No way to know anything about someone before they showed up at your door. No way to verify, check, prepare. Just hope and excitement and a completely irrational feeling about a car you hadn't seen yet.

I should probably start at the beginning.

I was 24. I had just moved back from London with no job, no money, and a suitcase full of optimism that was doing more work than it should have been.

Back at my parents' house in Perth. I had moved out eight years before and moving back in felt enormous and also completely necessary at the time.

I registered with a recruitment agency. A few weeks later they called: could I come in for a day? Their receptionist was sick.

The morning was spent on the front desk and the afternoon in the filing room, filing paper resumes in alphabetical order.

I know you know that particular kind of boring, but it was paying the bills.

A young man kept coming into the room to photocopy things.

On one of those trips, he stopped what he was doing and looked at me. And his very first question was: so, do you have a boyfriend?

I told him I had just got back from London after 2 years away.

At the end of the day I walked to the lift, we were on the mezzanine level of one of the larger Perth city buildings. Got in and waited as the doors closed.

As the lift headed to the ground floor,I thought: nawwww. He was nice. He had twinkly eyes.

What I didn't know: he had rushed out of the recruitment office to ask me out and he missed me by mere seconds.

Two weeks later, with a different agency, I had been interviewed for a new role and was getting the medical to confirm. The doctor's office was on the same mezzanine level of the same building in Perth.

While I was there, I decided to go in and take my name off the first agency's books. I had a brand new job and there was no need to stay on their system.

There were two women that worked closely with the young man, Michelle and Belinda.

Michelle took me into a conference room to hear about my new role. I didn't know that while we were talking, Belinda was outside egging the young man on.

I walked back to the lift, and he was standing beside it.

He asked me out. I said yes.

Which is how, a few days later, I came to be standing in my parents' kitchen listening to a car pull up the driveway and telling my mum: if he has a panel van, I'm not going.

He didn't.

We are about to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. He still has the twinkly eyes.

I think about serendipity a lot.

The universe tried twice. Both times I was somewhere I wasn't expecting to be. Both times it took someone else to make it possible.

You know this feeling, and have made your own version of that jump. No highlighted roadmap, no guarantees. Living life day to day and struggling to build differently.

Starting a business with a brain like yours, keeping it going, showing up when you are running on empty: that takes exactly the same faith.

Serendipity does not follow a schedule.It finds you when you are in the room. When you keep showing up. Even in the boring filing room. Even in the ordinary day when it feels way too hard on your own.

You are on this mailing list somehow. Maybe you don't remember signing up or for which product. Maybe someone sent it to you thinking you might like to know more about neurodiversity. Maybe you found it at exactly the right moment.

You are here because you are meant to be.

Sparkle Club opens 1 September. And maybe that is serendipity too.

Sometimes it takes a Michelle and a Belinda to make the connection happen. Sometimes, it’s connection with other women that are just like you.

If you've been wondering whether there's support out there for a brain like yours, I'd love to hear from you.

Mel x

P.S. Serendipity is one of my favourite words. It means the occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. I think the hidden part of that definition is:you have to be somewhere for it to find you and be open to what it might bring.

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ADHD Village- PO Box 475, Clifton Hill, 3068, Australia