HOW OLD ARE YOU?

The truth about the ageing crisis.

Earlier this year, I was hooked on this particular TV series called Younger. It is exactly the kind of show I gravitate towards after the longest days. It’s whimsy, easy to binge, and unashamedly full of fluff.

On its surface, the plot is a bubbly, low-stakes escape: a forty-year-old divorced mother tries to ease back into the corporate world, only to find that her age has rendered her invisible.

So, she shaves fourteen years off her life, claims she is twenty-six, and suddenly the doors swing wide open because she possesses the genetic fortune of looking “younger than her age.”

But underneath the cuteness was a premise that stayed with me long after the episodes ended.

We might be in the middle of an age reduction pandemic.

Everyone wants to shrink themselves backwards. Back into youth. Back into desirability. Back into a version of themselves that feels more socially acceptable, more marketable, more digestible.

We reduce our ages, our histories, our experiences, our bodies. We soften evidence of living until we become polished, curated versions of ourselves with no visible fingerprints of time. People as young as 27 are now dabbling into botox just to look a certain, acceptable way.

Why is it such a crime to look your age?

We are living through a slow-moving ageing crisis where the human experience is being systematically compressed. The message blaring from every screen and social structure is unyielding: to grow is to diminish.

We are taught to treat the natural progression of time as a liability to be managed, concealed, or cured entirely. We are coached to subtract our history just to remain palatable.

I turned 30 in April.

For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of this specific milestone. Thirty always felt like a beautiful horizon that had “grown-up” written in bold letters across its header. It always felt significant to me.

Yet, standing on the precipice of this new decade, I was struck by the strange, untidy reality of crossing over. In so many ways, I still feel entirely like a child. I am still clumsy, still awkward sometimes, and I still carry the kind of childlike curiosity that irritates people who have mistaken cynicism for maturity. But maybe that is the point.

The world often demands that we trade this wonder for a rigid, standardized maturity, while simultaneously ordering us to freeze our faces and live in denial.

Somewhere along the line, ageing became forbidden territory. We speak about it in hushed tones.

People announce their ages apologetically, as though they are confessing to something embarrassing. Entire industries are built on convincing us that evidence of time on the body is something to battle, erase, reverse.

Grey hairs must be dyed.
Smile lines must be erased.
Bodies must continuously look a certain way, devoid of wrinkle.
Women especially are taught to fear ageing like it is an approaching disaster instead of a privilege.

But I never want to arrive at a point in my life where I am embarrassed to be my age.

I never want to reach a point where I am ashamed to occupy the exact coordinates of my time on earth. I want to act my age, to say my age with a clear and steady voice, and to look my age without apology.

Who truly cares if your hair begins to grey, acting as a physical record of the storms you have weathered? Who cares if there is a new, deliberate pop to your step because your knees are beginning to feel the weight of the miles you’ve walked?

I want to say it fully. Freely. Without hesitation.

Because what is age, really, if not survival made visible?

Every line on your face is proof that you were here. Every fading part is evidence that time passed through you and you remained standing. Your knees ache because they carried you through decades of becoming. Your body changes because bodies are supposed to. That is what living does to a person.

And there is something profoundly sad about spending the second half of your life grieving the first.

Who told us the best parts of ourselves only existed behind us? Who convinced us that youth is the highest form of human value?

There is beauty in becoming. Beauty in evolution. Beauty in outgrowing old versions of yourself.

There are joys that only reveal themselves with age: deeper self-awareness, surer certainties, richer love, clearer boundaries, the confidence of finally understanding that your worth is not tied to how closely you resemble your younger self.

Your age is not something to conceal.

It is a signpost. It says: I was here. I survived this far. I kept going.

And that deserves reverence, not shame.

So no, I do not want to intentionally reduce myself to remain palatable to the world.

I do not want to spend my life chasing the ghost of who I used to be while completely missing the miracle of who I am becoming.

To reject our age is to engage in a profound act of self-erasure.

You are every bit as wonderful, as capable, and as vibrant in this present moment as you were a decade ago. In fact, you are more, because you are cumulative.

The future holds an immense, unfolding promise of what could be, but it is a landscape we can never truly uncover if we are dragging the anchor of a manufactured youth behind us.

You cannot step boldly into the next chapter if you are obsessively erasing the page numbers of the story you are actively writing.

Your age is a monument that declares exactly how many years you have navigated, negotiated, and survived this beautiful, chaotic jungle we call life.

Every wrinkly line, every stretch mark, and every shift in momentum is a badge of honor, earned in the trenches of actual living.

It is the definitive evidence that you were here, that you felt, and that you endured. To own your age is to claim your power.

It is time to stop shrinking into the fiction of who we used to be, and instead stand tall in the magnificent reality of who we are.

This year, as I mused about turning 30, I think I finally realized that growing older is not the tragedy. Refusing to grow into yourself is.

It is okay for your body to tell the age you are. This is the ultimate proof of living. Imagine nurturing a seed that keeps refusing to sprout into a plant just because it is afraid of looking different.

Signed,

A grown woman.

All my love,

Oreva.