Aging incomprehensibly

This August, the band Big Thief released a song called “Incomprehensible,” and it is about getting older. Yikes! Worst of all, it has wormed its way into a TikTok slideshow trend. Double yikes! TikTok has not been kind to the aging girl: a forum to promote infrared anti-wrinkle masks and face yoga and freezing your body in time, a platform for dermatologists who show you how drastically your young face will morph with the years if you do not buy their cure-all. 

It has become increasingly rare that I see TikTok start a movement that I want to be a part of, but Incomprehensible is changing that. To the sweet sounds of Adrienne Lenker’s wisdom, users are sharing photos of the women in their lives thriving at all ages, celebrating aging instead of campaigning against it. It has inspired me to do the same. 

“I’m afraid of getting older,” that’s what I learned to say

‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.”

My little sister is scared to turn thirteen, and she tells me so. We are staring at our reflections in the bathroom mirror, and I am tying a bow on the end of her braid. I tell her not to worry, she will be a good teenager. She asks me if I can help her buy eye cream. Her friend Ava says it will prevent wrinkles. You have to start early. 

“The message spins and spirals, ‘Don’t get saggy, don’t get gray’“

But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder.”

My Abuela tells me she wants to get Botox under her eyes, but it’s too expensive. She tells me she feels ugly, and she says it in English, so it sticks out stark against the rest of her speech. Her bathroom counter is littered with “anti-aging” potions, and she is frustrated that none of them are working. She says she spends too much money at the hair salon. There is always something new to try. 

“My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too

They wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew.”

Last summer, my mother suffered an illness that almost killed her. Your white blood cells don’t care if you start using eye cream at age thirteen. My mother’s face is a map that she calls wrinkled. On her skin, I can read the braille for crying during sad movies and smiling so big she squints and raising three kids in a way you can see and feel and touch. She is the strongest woman I know. She is so beautiful. Watching her get older is a blessing I could never truly put into words. 

“And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue

How can beauty that is living be anything but true?”

This summer, my mother stopped dyeing her hair. It is growing in thick and silver, making her nervous to walk through old rooms and see familiar faces, but I think she looks exactly how she’s meant to. 

My Abuela tells me about her bucket list. She is traveling, and each new hot sun gives her a new freckle. She does not wear sunscreen, and she says she doesn’t care unless it’s cancer. 

My little sister tells me that when she went to the mall last week, Ava bought three different kinds of anti-aging serum. She bought a pair of gummy bear earrings from Claire’s because “You said I don’t need that stuff.” 

We are all a bit shaken by the impermanence of life, and getting older is proof that it all goes on a bit longer. Gray hair and freckles and gummy bear earrings: how lucky are we to age! 

“So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair

Let me dance in front of people without a care.”

There is no privilege like that of getting old. In an age of filler injections and magic creams and TV-infomercial scare tactics, I want my little sister to grow up on Big Thief’s words, and I want my mother and my Abuela to grow old by them. Someday, I will wear my age like a badge of honor. I will have freckles because I am lucky to have time to sit in the sun. I will have emotions so pure and deep and all-consuming that you could trace them in smile lines and crow's feet. I will have a body that twists and sags and withers just like all of nature does — the trees and the weeds and my mother and her mother too. 

The earth will spin, and I will get older, and when you look into my eyes, I want you to see these revolutions. How can beauty that is living be anything but true!

Dedicada a mi mamá y a todos sus años de amor. ¡A muchísimos más! 

(Dedicated to my mother and all her years of love. To many more!)

Hailey Finkelstein is a sophomore from Ardsley, New York studying Medicine, Science and the Humanities with a concentration in Writing Seminars.