25

        The average human brain develops in spurts, growing exponentially in some phases of our lives, slower in others. Most scientists agree, however, that the brain is largely finished developing at the age of 25. By then, most of the important neurons have developed, made connections and the vast majority of your maturing has occurred. Because of this, big life events that occur before the paramount year of 25 have more of a lasting and significant effect on the brain.

        It would be like sticking your finger into a cookie fresh out of the oven before it has had time to set. It’s still a cookie, but the indent of your finger would harden as a part of the structure of that treat. A brain is much like a baked good and that baked good takes 25 years to be golden brown.

        I was hired as a police officer on my 23rd birthday.

        The day you raise your right hand and swear in front of your family and God to dedicate your life to public service and receive your badge, that is not the day you become a police officer. The day you show up to your first shift, drive a patrol car on your own and answer your first radio call, is not the day you become a police officer. Most days, it feels like when I lace my boots up and click my duty belt onto my waist, my goal is to not only do my job, but it is to also convince everyone around me that I am capable and allowed to do that job. The day you become a police officer is not just one day, it happens slowly and overtime and you look back and realize that for better or for worse, you’re not the same person who took that oath and pinned on that badge.

        It is through privilege, luck, and a sheltered youth that I came into this job shiny, new and unbroken. I had never seen a freshly dead body before. I had never smelled blood before, where there is such a high quantity of blood in a small area that you can smell the thick, irony, putrid odor of human blood. I had never heard a mother scream after calling 911 to say her son had just been shot, that he was a good kid, that he didn’t deserve this. I had never sat in the pediatric emergency room of a hospital while a rape kit is done on a girl who wasn’t even old enough to get her her learner’s permit.

        If the world was a movie, I would never have been cast as a police officer. A kindergarten teacher or a librarian, maybe – but a police officer, probably not. I get carded at rated-R movies, videos of puppies seeing their soldiers coming home from war make me cry like a baby, and if I could only bake cookies for the rest of my life I would be a happy woman. On paper, I was never cut out for this. I am too young, too soft, too sensitive to all the terrors of the world.

        My first six months as a police officer I never slept through the night. That is in part because the night shift is a joke to the body’s circadian rhythm. Mostly, however it was due to the dreams constantly reminding me that I was 23 and not mentally equipped for this. Dreams ranged from forgetting my notebook on a crime scene to my gun dribbling out bullets like a turned off water hose when faced with The Big Bad Guy.

        Friends love to ask: “What was your worst call?”. They ask it with a childlike wonder and you can’t fault people for their morbid curiosity; they want to know what your role was in Die Hard, Hawaii 5-0, or Blue Bloods. What they really want to hear, however, is something that is palatable for them, maybe a gnarly car accident where everyone lives, or a fast-paced car chase where no one wrecked, perhaps a fight where the bad guy was subdued with no injury.

        The question is pure in its intent, but not true in its request. They don’t want to hear the welfare check where I found a 20 year old’s Army photo sitting atop his suicide note letting his mother know that no, it was not her fault, nestled beneath the pocket knife gifted to him from his father. They don’t want to know that I went on that call with an officer who had lost a brother to suicide. That I called my friend afterwards, crying. Nor do they want to hear about the domestic that you have gone to so many times that it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a homicide.

        Strangers enjoy the question: “What is it like being a police officer?”. And we love to respond with glib responses that placate a curious citizen, we tell them that it’s fun because we get to chase people, that it’s boring and a lot more paperwork than most people would think, or that it has its good and bads like any other job.

        We don’t tell strangers about our radio dispatcher saying, as calmly as I’m sure she could muster, “Officers advised that they have been shot. Officers respond to their location – code one.” About spending hours and days praying and hoping that your friends, coworkers, brothers weren’t going to pay the ultimate price.

        I was 23 years old when I worked my first homicide. 23 years old when I pulled a gun out of the waistband of a man whose eyes were protruding so far out his head, it’s amazing they ever fit in there in the first place. 23 when I was having to shoo away the stray cats from eating his brain matter that had splattered on the sidewalk. 23 years old when the dead man’s brother came screaming onto the scene, wailing for the loss of his big brother – his big brother who was only 20. The brain that was now spread on the wet cement of his childhood neighborhood, never had the chance to finish developing.

        I was 24 years old the first time I was on the wrong end of a gun. An upset 19 year old boy decided whatever he was angry about was enough to rack back the slide of a pistol, look me in my eyes and tell me and my partner to “Get the fuck back,” and raise the barrell of a shiny, new, Glock 25. His 19 year old brain, not having yet fully matured, was either about to kill two 24 year old officers, or get killed by them. Three brains, none fully developed, all with pistols in their hands.

        I think that a lot of people believe that fear is trained out of police officers. That during our time in the academy or on the streets, we have developed some inhuman sieve to filter out all things frightful. But these things, the things we see and experience, these are the things that make your heart go from its comfortable position in your chest to somewhere near your belly button.

        When your fingers and toes go cold and numb and your pulse seems to have left you. Your whole being vibrates with what you tell yourself is adrenaline, but you know it’s nothing but primal, inescapable fear. Fear that you’re going to do something wrong, fear that you’re going to make a mistake, or fear that today is the day that no matter how well-trained and skilled you are, someone is going to decide that you don’t get to go home.

        Fight or flight is not an option anymore. The only option now is flight towards the fight and that goes against every instinct your body is screaming at you. When you hear gunshots and drive towards them, when you hear screaming and you run in its direction. It’s unnatural and not conducive to your body’s survival techniques that have been evolving over millions of years of trying to keep the human species alive.

        25 years. That’s the average time after which most police officers retire from the job. It’s not sustainable for the mind or body to continue doing for long after that. You see and do so many things on the job that I would imagine that your brain is ready to burst and your body, ready to crumble under the stress. 25 is a good, solid number – the amount of years it takes for your brain to be done cooking is the same amount of years it takes for your body to break down from doing the job you trained for. If 25 is the magic number, then I am finally finished cooking and I need this year to be good to me.