We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be.

Hutton frames aging not as decline but as earned evidence of living. By calling wrinkles “medals,” she reverses a beauty culture that treats signs of age as defects to erase, recasting them as honors that testify to endurance, experience, and survival. The line “We have to be able to grow up” suggests maturity includes accepting time’s visible marks rather than remaining trapped in an ideal of perpetual youth. The final clause links past and future: our faces record what we’ve endured (“what we have been through”) and also reflect agency and aspiration (“who we want to be”), implying that selfhood is shaped by both memory and intention.