Turning twenty five & the narratives I tell myself
I’m going to be twenty-five in a few days time. June has really crept up on me. Twenty-five has really crept up on me too.
My birthday rolls around this month (the most existential time of the year).
This year feels especially existential because of a fact that caught me off guard. I recently heard that twenty-five is the rough biological age in which the brain’s pre-frontal cortex becomes more or less fully formed. There’s nothing like a cold, hard fact to sober you from your bliss. Hitting stages in particular make me feel existential. My sixteenth birthday was characterised my a teenage crisis that I hadn’t done anything remarkable at this point, lamenting that I could never be a child prodigy and somehow convincing myself things aren’t that impressive after the age sixteen (i’m quite glad that’s not actually the case).
Stages have always made me feel as if something is passing me by, the finality of it feels so scary. Honestly, I didn’t expect to hit a new developmental stage until my thirties, or maybe even when I one day hit menopause, so learning that my brain might have reached a plateau in it’s development was deeply concerning to me. It made the last four years feel somewhat wasted and posed an even more gigantic realisation: all this time i’ve been forming?!
I guess this ‘pre-frontal cortex business’ is simply biological language to explain something that has always been going on. I’ve always been forming and I will be forming long after twenty-five. But suddenly, it feels more imperative that I put myself in places conducive for expansion, for forming myself into the person i’d like to become. To quit scrolling and deferring my precious responsibility of shaping myself to a gazillion unknown content creators.
At this point, if you’re wondering why it took this biological fact to persuade me to start helping myself more, you’re asking the million-dollar question. Let me know if you have an answer.
Another reason for this year’s existential fear is that I have had some interesting health revelations lately. I’ve been investigating my hormones this year (about time after battling with poor mental health, acne, weight gain etc since I was eleven). I have been diagnosed with PCOS caused my insulin resistance and as a result, my cholesterol level is well above where it should be.
Again, cholesterol is a problem that I thought would surface a lot later down the line. I never imaged that at twenty five, i’d be considering buying rich tea biscuits, taking regular medication, and googling diabetes-friendly recipes. Truly, I never thought i’d be advised to reduce my one-unit-a-month alcohol intake. And yet, there’s a lot to be thankful for. In knowing this information, I have a lot more compassion for myself, I understand my body a whole lot more and I can take informed action to now prevent myself from developing cardiovascular and fertility issues.
Knowing that my 25 year-old brain becoming more formed and solidified, I am increasingly aware of the narratives I am telling myself. I have been studying counselling for the last year and we talk all about our ‘organismic self’ the person we were before social conditioning kicked in, before we became self-conscious and shaped by people and past experiences. Like dried icing sugar in water, narratives get lodged with us and are pretty difficult to undo…but not impossible.
The narratives that I suffer from at birthdays often involve the word ‘should’ and offer a very tightrope picture of what life should look like. I shouldn’t have cholesterol problems at this age. I should have achieved more by this age. Maybe, by now, I should be the kind of person who likes birthday parties and maybe life should look a lot fuller than this.
There’s a lot of pressure on the twenties and people paint a lot of pictures of what this period should look like: “best years of your life”, “in your prime”, and a favourite of mine: “your twenties are the time to try everything” *proceeds to write ‘everything’ on the to-do list*. Not to mention the bottomless string of reels that romanticise friendship, clothes, morning routines and romantic relationships.
In counselling, our aim is to encourage clients to find an ‘internal locus of motivation’ - i.e to live lives from the inside not the outside and create lives that are meaningful for them rather than pleasing to everyone else.
My aim for 25, is to find the same for me. To abandon other people’s romanticised ideals and take courage in my own. To resist the urge to harden, to contract, to numb and distract. To pay attention to the stories i’m telling myself. To place myself in a terrarium, finding nutrients for growth by going inward, being an ecosystem rather than a consumer, and to stay soft and curious.
As Elizabeth Oldfield, the host of the podcast that i’ve newly begun working at, says “we need to pay attention to our formation”, to the things forming and shaping us. I want to start participating in who I am becoming.
