Me and My Fully Developed Frontal Lobe

A reflection on turning 25, brain development, and Idiot Plots.

The day of October 19th was notable for two reasons this year. The first being that it was unseasonably warm for late October and the second being that I turned 25 years old. I feel oddly proud, smug even, of having survived this long. Though I’m aware that it isn’t the same grand achievement it once was. Keeping oneself alive for a quarter of a century used to be a much trickier task back in the day. Practically anything could kill you! Blight, the Pox, pillagers mercilessly sacking your village and stealing your women, a paper cut turned infectious, a slight chill in the air, nervousness. Whereas all I had to do to get this far was not kill myself, and I found even that to be a tall order sometimes. But even in my darkest hours, I always found the strength to press on. I needed to make it to twenty-five. I couldn’t die without first knowing what it’s like to have a fully developed frontal lobe, a fully developed brain. And now that I’m 25 years old, I do.

A tangible excitement wafted through the air in the days leading up to my 25th birthday. My eyes glowed with the kind of manic eagerness you see in children right before they tear open their birthday presents. But this year, my present wouldn’t come wrapped in a shiny box or bow. No, no! My gift, which I’d been eagerly awaiting since 15 years old, would come in the form of a fully developed frontal lobe. Before learning that such a thing existed, I’d assumed that my brain would complete its development in tandem with my body - sometime during puberty, surely. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school, when I took AP Psychology taught by Mrs. DeCosta, that I learned the sobering truth. Mrs. Decosta was a slim, middle-aged woman with frizzy blonde hair that curled to the waist. You could tell from her choice of eyeglass frames alone that this was a woman who never missed yoga. Everything about her outward appearance radiated “zen,” which contrasted with her tendency to shit talk other teachers in front of students. I remember that I was sluggish, on the verge of dozing off when she dropped the bombshell. “The human brain won’t finish developing until 25,” she said, “which means your brains are nowhere near fully developed. No siree! You all have a loooooong way to go!”

I did not take this news well. Nor did I appreciate the glibness coating Mrs. DeCosta’s tone as she delivered it. I’d always thought of myself as exceptionally mature for my age, perhaps because I based so much of my personality on being in the advanced reading group in kindergarten. So to learn that a large chunk of my mind would remain immature until my 20’s? It was a devastating hit to my brand. My brain… not fully developed? What about all those English teachers that called me “wise beyond my years?”What about my therapist who just recently called me an “old soul?” Did all of that mean nothing? “Earth to Keara!” Mrs. DeCosta snapped, rudely interrupting my grapple with denial. This was common practice among my teachers during my school days. Though I was a bright student, I had a pension for ignoring lectures and “zoning out” into the much more thrilling scenarios taking place in my head.

Once my eyes lost their dreamlike glaze, Mrs. DeCosta pressed on with her lecture. In it, she explained how the brain develops rapidly from ages zero to four - like a college student hammering out an essay on adderall, so too does the brain hammer out the initial stages of development. By age five, ninety percent of brain development has been checked off the to-do list. Woohoo! Surely we can knock the remaining ten percent in a year or two, no? No, indeed! The final ten percent of brain development will take twenty years to complete (provided its host doesn’t die of nervousness beforehand). Last to cross the finish line is the frontal lobe, which finishes with a development time of 25 years. Controlled here are executive functions like self control, suppressing impulses, judgement, understanding consequences, planning. In short, all the skills your parents begged you to use as a teenager are housed in Casa Del Frontal Lobe, which is unfortunately closed for construction during adolescence. I can only assume that this timing is part of a larger, concerted effort by God to make the lives of parents hell.

After 45 minutes of listing all the ways in which we, the students sitting in front of her, were mentally handicapped by our undeveloped brains, Mrs. DeCosta wanted to end the class on a positive note. “Though you kids are programmed to make idiotic decisions right now, take stock in the fact that you won’t be idiots forever,” she said, “Something to look forward to, no?” Yes, I thought to myself, that is something to look forward to.

These days, I find myself looking back. The months following my 25th birthday have felt, quite frankly, a lot like the week after Christmas. After ten years of buildup, the countdown is finally over. There’s no more frontal lobe to develop, what I have is what I got, and what I got falls a bit… short. Call me naive, but I’d assumed that once my brain development was out of the way, nothing would stand between me and my destiny of becoming the super genius I was born to be. So imagine my disappointment when I awoke the morning of my 25th birthday to find that no Sherlock-Holmes-style mind palace had constructed itself in my brain overnight. To add insult to injury, my mystery solving skills have failed to show even the slightest improvement. I bought that houndstooth jacket and wooden pipe for nothing…

Even more surprising than my lack of genius skills is the strange sense of nostalgia I now harbor towards the unripened mind of my youth. I feel like Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings - you know, when he goes off with the elves because his hero’s journey in The Shire has come to an end and though he knows he’ll be better off in elf land, he still sheds a tiny Hobbit tear, for he also knows that there’s no going back. I feel like that basically. I feel like I’m saying goodbye, probably because I am. As I sail into the distant land of understanding consequences, thinking things through, judgement and the like, I say goodbye to a certain sense of freedom, one that I perhaps took for granted.

For one thing, people used to cut me wayyy more slack. When my parents caught four year old Keara attempting to drown her older sister in the pool during the family vacation to Mexico, they gave me the benefit of the doubt instead of trying me for murder (After all, if I had premeditated the attempted slaying of my own kin, I wouldn’t have done it with witnesses around, would I now? Case closed!). Whereas if I tried to drown my older sister today, well then I’d better have a good lawyer! Because now my actions have consequences, now I should know better. And nowadays I usually do know better, which in itself is a kind of loss. I find it much harder to act on impulse these days, to live by the “Fuck it, we ball” creed that defined so much of my youth. Living spontaneously for a night is no longer my automatic setting but rather a deliberate choice. Something in me, something that wasn’t there before, forces me to stop and think about the potential consequences of “fucking it” and “balling.” Even when I do manage to let myself go, there’s something about saying to oneself, “Tonight, I’m going to be spontaneous!” that makes any and all spontaneous actions that follow seem insincere.

Sure, there were times when the rash decisions of my undeveloped brain landed me in hot water. Like that time I snuck out in highschool only for my parents to bust me the very next morning. I’ll never forget the terror that struck my heart when I picked up the phone and heard my mother utter the words, “Keara. You better be in a hospital… or I’m going to put you in a hospital.” I don’t presume to know exactly how the citizens of Pompeii felt when they beheld the ashes of doom raining down from the sky, but that phone call from my mother gave me a pretty good idea.Then there was the time my friends and I ran from the cops at a house party and decided to recoup (as in keep drinking) on the blacktop of our local middle school, which as it turns out is private property. The fuzz arrived on the scene not but twenty minutes later, forcing my comrades and I to take cover in the depths of a surrounding bamboo brush, wherein we hid until the coast was clear. Perhaps the police were not in the mood to drag a dozen drunk 16 year olds out of a thicket humid enough to trigger a Nam flashback, or perhaps it was just sheer luck. Either way, our guerilla tactics of evasion won the day.

Reflecting on memories such as these, I’m struck by the sheer stupidity of my younger self. My frontal lobe must have been the size of a pea! No judgement, no concept of consequences, no planning, no cognitive control! The Jiminy Cricket living on my shoulder delivered his warnings in high-pitched whispers back then. Nowadays, he shrieks like a banshee. Even Desire, whose voice once rolled like thunder, can no longer drown out Jiminy’s incessant chirping. Sometimes I wish I could just squash him! So what if it would end in a colossal mistake? So what if it would end with me hunched over like a gorilla, using a bamboo leaf as toilet paper whilst the police close in? So what if it would end in a projectile vomiting episode across my friend Jen’s basement that I still don’t believe she’s fully forgiven me for? Well, at least I’d get a good story out of it.

I think that’s what I’m having trouble saying goodbye to - the stories. The writer in me fears, and the AP Psychology student in me knows, that my newfound maturity will prevent certain stories from ever taking place. In the world of literary and media criticism, the term “Idiot Plot” is defined as one that is “kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot.” For the first 20 or so years of my life, nearly all of my stories were Idiot Plots and nearly all of those Idiot Plots starred myself in the titular role. I had a lot of fun playing the Idiot, even when it ended in tragedy, but the role comes less naturally to me these days. Like Frodo before me, I find myself unable to slip back into my former role of happy-go-lucky, simple-minded short person. I’m too changed, albeit still just as short.

Like any actor bidding adieu to the role that made them, I worry that my next gig won’t entertain as much as my last. What if my most exciting stories are behind me? Before I panic at the thought, I remind myself of how it felt to be 11 years old, two days out from starting middle school and sobbing to my mother because I asked the hairstylist for side bangs (they looked super chic on the girl covering that month’s issue of Hair Magazine, okay?). The memory washes down the panic in my throat and leaves me with only the sweet sense of relief. Now down on my knees, I thank God for the blessing that is my fully developed frontal lobe and pray it prevents me from doing anything even half as impulsive as “Side Bang Incident.”

I recognize that a small part of me will always miss the days when life was just a series of Idiot Plots, when ignorance was bliss, when it was apparent to all that my brain wasn’t cooked all the way through and I was given grace because of it. But a big part of me is eager to sink my teeth into new and wholly different kinds of stories, no matter how boring they might be. And hey, maybe those new stories won’t be boring at all, maybe they’ll be better than the Idiot Plots! We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?