You're Never Too Old to Learn How to Twerk

A friend of mine recently told me she was too old to go to a nearby “twerking” class in Ravenswood (Chicago, of course.)

She's not old, not even close. She's around the same age as me, and if she's old, then I'm old and I am NOT old, thanks.

To be fair, I don't think she actually wants to learn how to twerk, so that's not really the point. The point is how naturally it came out, like it was an objective fact. "I'm too old." The end. Puke.

It made me laugh because I fully intend on learning how to twerk one day. Will I be good at it? Not immediately, but I have every intention of getting there. Will I look ridiculous? Maybe to me, but everyone else is probably too busy worrying about themselves. If I'm lucky enough to make it to old age, I refuse to spend any part of my life crossing random experiences off my list because I decided I'd aged out of them, and I'll be damned if I stop twerking just because I'm 90.

The older I get, the more I notice these invisible expiration dates people carry around. Some people are too old to wear certain clothes, too old to travel alone, too old to date again after a divorce, too old to dye their hair pink, too old to go back to school, and too old to start over.

When I moved to Chicago, one of the biggest reasons was the music scene. Then the pandemic happened, music faded into the background, and somewhere along the way I started acting like maybe that chapter of my life had already happened. I wasn't saying, "I'm too old," but I was telling myself a version of the same story: Maybe I missed my chance. Thankfully, I was wrong.

A few years later, I found myself carrying a cardboard sign around Riot Fest looking for a band. Now I'm recording an album, touring the Pacific Northwest, and making art with people I genuinely love. Not because I suddenly became more talented than I was before, but because I stopped treating that story like it was true.

I'm less interested in whether people are actually too old (age ain’t nothin’ but a number, baby), and more interested in the stories they tell themselves about why they can't do something.

We repeat them enough that they stop sounding like opinions and start sounding like facts.

I once coached a woman who believed she'd missed her chance at finding the kind of relationship she actually wanted. She stayed in one where she was constantly walking on eggshells, where date nights never happened unless she planned them, and where asking for flowers somehow felt like asking for the moon. She told herself it was too late to start over. Who would want her at this age? Would the pain and the financial hardships be worth sacrificing something that had become comfortable, even though it wasn’t the life she wanted?

Eventually she left. At the session afterwards she told me, "I wish I'd done it sooner."

We don't usually wake up one morning and decide to give up on ourselves. Instead we inherit a sentence, repeat it for long enough, and eventually stop questioning it. That's why I asked my friend, "other than you, who says you’re too old?"

I don't think twerking was ever the point. The point was how quickly she'd accepted a rule that nobody had actually made.

If she can casually decide she's too old for something completely arbitrary, what else has she ruled out without realizing it? What's one story about yourself that you've been treating like it's carved in stone?

If this article made you think of a sentence you've been carrying around for years, I'd encourage you to get curious about it.

And if you'd rather not do that alone, I'd be happy to wonder with you.