my frontal lobe didn't develop until i was 35

type b big sister advice for those feeling lost in life

My frontal lobe didn’t develop until I was 35.

Which is to say that it took me longer than most to feel like I had my life together even a little bit. Up until that point, I had a series of romantic partners who’s mess eclipsed my own, a string of really shitty apartments where I couldn’t bring myself to ever check the mail, and a mountain of work that I would bury myself in, jealously guarding all of my creative work so no one would ever know about it.

I’m 36 now, and I still feel like I’m 17, except with the addition of the aforementioned frontal lobe, a pug who is fully blind, and a career where I get to think and write deeply about the things I care about (and people actually buy the books I make, which still shocks me). I couldn’t have imagined this life when I was 27 or 17. I thought I was going to die at the back of a bus headed to downtown Chicago, or in an alleyway between bars in Columbus, Ohio, or in my teenage bedroom before I got to live this life.

Maybe you feel this way, too. Or maybe you are 27 and thinking you should have figured it out by now but feel yourself incapable of ever getting it together. Maybe you have a partner who feels more like a project or an apartment that’s falling into ruin or creative ambitions that live inside your head while you spend all your energy just trying to survive. Maybe you have all three of these things plus an addiction to energy drinks and a fear that if you ever show your work to someone else, they will immediately cancel you for being such a little freak.

Or maybe your frontal lobe is developed, in which case, maybe skip this newsletter and I’ll see you back here next week.

But for the rest of us — 47 or 37 or 27 still feeling 17 wondering when you’ll actually be grown up — I have a lot to tell you about what I’ve learned about making a life you actually want to live.

And the first thing I wish someone had told me in all my decades previous to this one: when you win, everyone around you benefits.

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I spent way too long holding myself back from what I really wanted to do. I somehow went from a public school in Ohio to a near-Ivy League school in Chicago for undergrad, but I thought it was some kind of mistake on the part of admin that I had gotten there. And I was worried my parents were going to disown me, so I spent most of my time there extremely mentally ill and racing back and forth between Chicago and Ohio to beg people to love me.

Once I got to grad school, same story. I felt like I had to align all the pieces just so — a boyfriend, prestigious jobs at journals, and stacked extracurricular endeavors. But the guy I decided to move in with was a perpetual victim for a lot of our relationship and so my new job became monitoring his moods and wondering if he was going to release my dog into the street if I didn’t come home on time (this actually happened!).

I thought if I could build other people up, then I would be allowed some little sliver of space to write the books I wanted to write and find the success I was striving for in every line I wrote.

That was a fuuuuucking lie. And I told it to myself over and over again until I had given so much to everyone around me that I found myself begging people to stay who didn’t even see me as a person with dreams or goals or ambitions or any of that.

Now I know the lie for what it is. A lot of femmes and queer people tell themselves that their success is conditional on the happiness and good health of everyone else around them. But what we miss in that pursuit of making sure everyone else is good before we even think of tending to our own inner lives or our creative world or even taking care of ourselves is that no one benefits when you burn yourself out on forcing them to thrive.

Last year, around the time my frontal lobe developed, I decided that I was done waiting for everyone else to be good. I would take the space I wanted to take for my art, my work, myself — all of it — and in doing so, the people around me, the ones I really love and care about, would benefit.

And it’s true. I don’t know if I made it true by just repeating it to myself a bunch of times, thereby shifting realities like the girls on TikTok tell me I can, or if it was just always true, if the universe was just always waiting for me to pour into myself, my art, my life. And sure, some people will stand with arms full of flowers you grew and still be unhappy, but that’s none of your business.

Your only job is to water yourself, water your flowers.

Ok angels, this was an EXPERIMENT. I love experiments, and I’ve been writing these little insights down in my journal and y’all voted over on insta and said you wanted big sister advice, so please lmk if you liked this and if you want this to become a more regular feature here at Internet Bedroom.

If you’re new here, I hope you’ll stick around because next week I have a fat, juicy weirdo reading list for ya plus a look at a very special issue of the iconic Sassy magazine, which I wrote about in my deep dive into Rookie mag last week.

Be sure to snag your copy of In the Girls’ Room because I only have a few physical copies left on hand!!! I will be going into a second printing (!!!) which feels so wild to say, but I gotta say that the first printing has some very special anomalies for my collectors out there. You can click the pic below to grab ur copy <3

I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have been able to bring this work to you all and have it received so well. I still can’t wrap my head around it and all I can say is thank you thank you thank you.