I ate breakfast in the car park

Dear Delyara, I’m a woman in my fifties, and this morning I ate a banana and half a cereal bar in the car park outside my GP surgery because I left the house too late to eat properly and did not want to faint in the waiting room. I sat there watching other people go in and out of the building and suddenly felt very emotional for no dramatic reason. Maybe because I was tired. Maybe because I have spent so many years feeding other people first. Maybe because growing older is such a private shock sometimes. One day you are helping everybody else get through their lives, and the next day you are sitting in your car outside a clinic thinking about your own body and how little attention you have given it until it started asking more loudly. I finished the cereal bar, checked my face in the mirror, and went inside like a woman who was managing fine. That is what I looked like. It was not exactly what I felt like.