It's in your hands

My Garter Ripple Squish blanket in action

This post has a bit of a backstory, so grab a coffee and settle in.

A little while ago I made a fun reel for Instagram. The kind of light-hearted, entertaining, short clip we are encouraged to do to boost engagement and to make people smile.

I think it succeeded. It was a short clip of me putting on hand cream - so far, so good. As a knitter I prefer to keep hand cream away from my yarn and I also have a bit of sensory aversion to the feeling of cream on the palm of my hands and fingertips.

As a result I put cream onto the backs of my hands and rub the backs together (like a cricket rubs it’s back legs together). it always makes my husband laugh and judging by the Instagram reaction it struck a bit of a chord with others - both knitters and non-knitters alike.

You can see the reel here.

Like any reel that escapes containment, beyond your usual circle it also attracted a few comments that veered between the weird (less said about those the better) and the rude (ditto).

A few of the rude comments though had a bit of an unpleasant ageist tone to them. “No one wants to see your wrinkly, old lady hands” was one that particularly stood out.

And it really got me thinking, about how little we see of people over the age of 40 on the internet. When we do it is often a silver-haired model promoting something or a celebrity who has had their fair share of botox and other anti-ageing treatments. We so rarely see actual, older human skin without so much as an Instagram filter between it and the cold light of day. It’s no wonder that sometimes it can feel a little jarring.

But I like to think we are moving away from the era of over-polished, Instagram perfection. Seriously, how many airbrushed, pouty selfies do we need to see on our screens. Wouldn’t we rather see real-live human beings, women who look like us and reflect back to us the image we see in the mirror every morning. I know I would.

I posted this comment, again light-heartedly on Threads and people responded in their 1000s - I was genuinely stunned by the response. It was a total outpouring of love and solidarity - so many women joined in to show their hands too - and at a huge variety of ages.

It was a humbling but also completely awe-inspiring response to the power of social media. A power that is very literally in the palm of our hands.

The power of our hands

When you think about it our hands literally shape our lives. They care for our babies, they cook, clean, nurture. They grow things, cultivate crops, make so many everyday items upon which our lives depend.

The point at which humans evolved opposable thumbs is widely acknowledged to be a crucial point in human evolution - separating it, as it does from our closest other primate relatives. No other species has such a mobile opposable thumb and it arguable helped to drive the development of human cognitive abilities in a way that no other adaption did.

In short, hands are amazing and we should all be proud of them, no matter what they look like. In fact the older and more gnarly they look, the better. They speak of experience, skill, wisdom and so much more.

They literally made us who we are today.