I will turn 25 this week; that means I can rent a car without extra fees, I can stay on my parent’s health insurance for another year, and supposedly, I can call my prefrontal cortex “fully developed”. Looking at the world around me, I find that hard to believe.
Even if true, that mental milestone doesn’t remove the gap that lies between where I am now and where I could be next. There are skills and perspectives out there that I haven’t engaged in fully, each one being a chance to deepen my sense of empathy and understanding of the world. In the pursuit of impossible perfection, I’ve left a lot of my favorite fiction projects to the wayside for longer than I’d like to admit. And I have lots of room to grow as an effective community member and resistance reporter.
At the same time, I find myself reckoning with the fact that people my age or older with more traditional “successes” under their belt are often lacking in basic empathy and community decency. They’re often the ones standing on the other side of the road during protests, shouting the r-word and telling anyone who will listen to get a job.
Then there are those who want to engage in their communities, but are too wound up by the demands of corporate America, too preoccupied (reasonably so) with addressing the needs of their household to give any time to local movements. Even with community organizations ready to support those needs, many individuals have complicated feelings about asking for and accepting help.
As a resistance, we need to find a way to pull people in before they hit rock bottom, to support the community’s pressing physical needs so they can be mentally present with us. How can we expect to pool our minds together effectively if the water’s all clouded?
All of this to say, while it’s difficult to believe that my brain will be developmentally similar to the decades-older minds ruining our country, it makes perfect sense to me why the rest of us have been unable to utilize our smarts to their full potential, even for issues we deeply care about.
> River Graziano 