Growth
A tiny tenant cocooned carefully in its mothers egg hangs on a plastic peg from the top of the tank, each moment pulsing carefully, breathing, living.
This Spotted Catshark will take approximately nine months to grow into a mature shark, throughout that time, the shark will leave its coiled egg and learn to adapt into a brand new environment. When the shark matures, it will be allowed to join a larger tank and socialise. Currently the little shark is concentrating on growing.
The current length of the shark is approximately 10cm, when fully matured it will be approximately 100cm, though this will take several years.
I crane my neck back up, looking away from the tank and coming back down again, hanging over at an awkward angle not wanting to miss a thing. Each week I watch it change. Watching the egg fog over as the tiny tenant carefully runs out of space, waiting.
As I stand at the tank, I think about the resilience of babies within the oceanic world. How so many eggs are abandoned at the moment of birth while other species like Octopus give their lives to procreate, with males regularly dying soon after insemination - a once in a lifetime event for male octopi; whilst females usually die before her eggs hatch, her last days filled of starvation and exhaustion.
I look around around the aquarium, hearing the screams and funny footsteps of tiny people, pondering how it is human life became the unnatural rulers of the world - perhaps we will continue to just thank the opposable thumbs.
I regularly find it nothing short of a miracle that human children manage to become such resilient adults, not maturing until approximately 30 years into their lives by which point we have been subject to an arrange of individual events and circumstances, each out of our control; by the time this happens, humans are often ready to procreate themselves if they haven’t already.
Of course, like all things in the neurodivergent brain, maturity comes later. Thanks to the recent developements on the understanding of neurodivergence, studies looking at neurodivergent vs neurotypical brains are showing differences in growth. It is estimated that neurodivergent brains are maturing about 5 years later than their peers, this of course is leaving a huge impact on neurodivergent brains, amounting more problems to the daily life routine.
I have always found myself feeling developmentally delayed, when I was in primary school I felt like I sat on the outside of my friendship circles, watching and playing but not in the same way. In high school I didn’t understand crude jokes or references, now I’m going into my late 20’s I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the sterotypical timeline.
The journey of growth is one that doesn’t stop until our internal clock stops ticking but throughout that time we have to learn to adapt, for those of us with divergent brains, this process can be much harder. We have to learn to adapt to a world not built for us, the same way the shark was not meant to be born into captivity, neither were we.
