It’s my sister’s birthday this week! She is turning twenty-six and I can hardly believe it. She’s now saddled herself on the late side of her twenties and to celebrate I made a carrot cake. Gone are the birthday cakes of childhood and adolescence with Kit Kats stuck to the rim and a ball pit of smarties on top. No longer are we having Shrek, Barbie, or ‘whatever franchise has put out a new toy-themed’ cakes. Carrot cake is sleek, carrot cake is refined, carrot cake is graceful, carrot cake is oh so twenty-six. 

My sister turning twenty-six has made me think more about my birthday and how I will be turning twenty-five this year. While birthdays usually scare me and I’m no stranger to the birthday cry, I’m excited to turn twenty-five. I’m sure many of you have heard about how when you are twenty-five presumably your frontal lobe becomes fully formed. Not just your frontal lobe but your prefrontal cortex which is the part of your brain responsible for decision making and logical thinking. I imagine myself waking up on my twenty-fifth birthday, jumping out of bed, and suddenly realizing that cartoons are not my favourite shows anymore, that I know what I want to do with my life, and that I am blindly self-assured. In reality, I know this is a lot of pressure to put on myself and I’m sure late into my twenties I will still watch reruns of Avatar the Last Airbender, think about jumping on a plane to restart my life on a Greek island every other week, and will still have a shaky sense of self at best. But I like the idea of it. I like the thought that twenty-five marks the age of full brain development and that I hope to feel more balanced then; it’s something to look forward to and to relish when I’m there. When I was twenty-two, I stupidly had a thing (thing being all I can define it as) with someone who was twenty-eight and during this elusive thing, I began to realise that it couldn’t work because I still had so much turning out to do in my life. While they were already mostly turned out; a lot of who they were then would be who they were to be in the future. How could I expect my malleable self to not attach itself to something more solid like a vine climbing a tree? I imagined then that one day I’d wake up and realise that I turned out to be just like them and so I ended it because I didn’t want to lose my freedom to turn out on my own. 

While I find the idea of my brain being fully developed exciting and something to look forward to, there is skepticism on the matter. In The Myth of the 25-year-old Brain, Jane C. HU writes about the misconception of the ‘age 25 as a turning point with seemingly magical properties’. They continue;

‘There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood . . . people’s brains can look very different from one another at 25. If we’re leaving it up to neuroscience to define maturity, the answer is clear as mud’. 

So it seems scientifically that twenty-five is not a magical age where everything becomes clear and all your insecurities and anxieties are cleared away. But it feels like a milestone, one where you’re not so much changing but instead solidifying; one more step in the turning out process. I sometimes think about my younger self and how if I saw myself now when I was a child I would hardly believe the way I am. I never used to be able to form an opinion on anything. I never believed I was smart enough to counter other people’s viewpoints and, while I would know that I disagreed with something, I could never put into words why. I remember so many times when I’d breathe in to speak but my thoughts would get muddled and would then bottleneck in the back of my mouth, never to make it past my lips. Now I can’t stop talking and I have opinions that are mine and that are sometimes wrong but that’s okay. What I’m so excited for twenty-five about is to have even more opinions, even more thoughts, and even more ambitions, all hopefully more aligned with how I will eventually turn out. As Jane asserts, it’s possible that my brain is already fully developed or that it won’t develop fully until I’m twenty-five and a half; even if my frontal lobe is fully formed I may still be immature. That twenty-five might as well be any age in your twenties and that the twenty-five ‘new me’ trend is all hocus pocus. I know this, and yet I choose to believe that at twenty-five I will feel something akin to being better at knowing what I want and making good decisions. I don’t think believing that does anyone any harm (unless, obviously, you’re using a lack of brain development in young people to defend bad decisions or to justify discrimination and exclusion). So I can’t wait to turn twenty-five and I’ll let you all know how it feels when I get there.

As mentioned at the start, this week I made a carrot cake! So delicious and moist. The icing was tangy although I had a fight with it because it split and then I had to fix it by putting it on a bain-marie. I used a Nigella recipe and let me tell you, that gal knows a thing or two.

Goodbye for now.

Brain development: The myth the brain “matures” when you’re 25. (slate.com)

Ginger and Walnut Carrot Cake | Nigella’s Recipes | Nigella Lawson