n June, two of my friends set me up with David, a boy I knew from preschool and until 2011 had assumed was my cousin. We planned for our first date to take place at The Frick Collection, but any hopes of appreciating the best of 19th century art in a timely fashion were dashed at the sight of an endless line of colorful umbrellas snaking around East 70th St. Each umbrella was supported by the age-spotted hands of a pensioner; each pensioner emerged from a squad of Golden Era Adult Day Care vans. Unless we wanted to stand around until early bird dinner, we’d have to find alternate plans.

I was zooming in and out of Google Maps when a blobby gaggle of poncho’ed high schoolers skulked up Fifth. I hurried over to figure out where this school trip was headed. Wherever they’d go, we could go too, expanding the educational mission of New York City Public Schools by two more curious students.

I tapped a tall girl near the back on the shoulder. “Hi,” I said, in a calm and friendly tone. “Where are you guys going?”

She opened her mouth to respond, only to be interrupted by a cyclone of furious activity from stage right. I registered flapping hands and a look of righteous horror before clocking the words, which were, verbatim, as follows:

“HOW DARE

THEY ARE CHILDREN

A SCHOOL TRIP

SO DISGUSTING

I YOU GET

NO! SHOO

SHOO NOW”

I did not understand what was going on; I opened my mouth to try again; I pointed to Museum Mile and to the girl three inches taller than me. Finally, I was forced to conclude, naturally and incontrovertibly, that Hurricane Administrator thought I and David to be creepy pedophiles, or, generously, individuals exhibiting creepily pedophilic behavior. And we were. We were total creeps who had just touched random minors and asked them where they were going. We were disgusting.

My face cycled from pink to red to purple. I backed up before I did anything else weird, creepy, and disgusting. Once we had retreated to scaffolding safety, David punctuated every half-minute with self-deprecating jokes — and by “self” I mean myself — which would have made me feel way better and reminded me that we were just a couple goofy jokesters out in New York City if not for the fact that the content of the jokes were:

“Whoa, stay away from that baby bird, don’t want to have to call CPS”

and

“See, I’m allowed to get within fifty feet of this school, but you’re not.”

We somehow ended up at an Alice in Wonderland statue, where I crouched with my head between my knees at an appropriate distance from the cute young family admiring the fourteen-foot Cheshire Cat and wondered how I’d gotten here.

It was inconceivable that, in the great universal divide between Adorable Child and Creepy Adult, I could be on Team Creepy Adult. In no way did I belong to the adult team. I can’t drive, I don’t know what a stock is, and my idea of a good time is painting smiley faces on rocks. I have never drunk alcohol or sworn in my life.

It’s no fluke: when I was seven, my sister and I were playing with Magna-Tiles in a family friend’s home. Also in the room were the family friend’s two teenage children. They were lounging on the couch and watching “Judge Judy” when Judge Judy said the b-word.

Then and there I decided that I would forever be the kind of wholesome, innocent, clean-as-a-whistle person who would never, ever let the b-word be audible in the presence of children. I have more or less kept that promise for fourteen years.

The instinct to never let go of nature’s first green gold must have predated the Judge Judy episode; otherwise, it couldn’t possibly have triggered such a reaction. It has served me well over the years, except in the cases where it really hasn’t, because this is plainly a developmentally problematic complex which has inhibited me from embodying normal adult life.

That’s only one piece of my much bigger struggle with growing up. Here is the pro and con list of leaving Neverland and becoming an adult:

PROS:

- Can manage own Schwab account rather than custodial account
- Allowed to throw axes at Urban Axes
- May become notary in state of Massachusetts

CONS:

- Expected to know how to open said Schwab account
- Must clap for others’ living room plays rather than starring in own
- Considered a pedophile by passing school administrators

It’s a bum deal and I don’t know why anyone takes it. I am only the forty billionth person to come to this realization (you have to remember that most of the 110 billion people who have ever lived died in childhood) but it appears I struggle with it more than most.

Aging, however, is not going to slow down and wait for me to catch my breath. I got very excited when the Science Center Plaza hosted a petting zoo in the spring, kitted out with baby goats, ducklings, and bunnies. I squatted down next to a bunny only to get “Which one is yours?” from a kind lady next to me gesturing at the three-year-olds filling the space. Aging, (supposedly) said the poet George Oppen: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”

I explained this to my friend Camille on the shag carpet of her Pforzheimer dorm a few weeks ago. Camille gave me a weird look — at least I think she did; the only skin bits visible below the BIODANCE Bio-Collagen Real Deep Mask, Hydrating Overnight Hydrogel Face Mask, Pore Minimizing, Elasticity, Plumping Mask were half an eyebrow and a flash of cornea. Camille knows me for who I really am, which is 21.

“You are eligible for jury duty,” Camille pointed out. “You helped me convince Josh to stop holding my hand during section, and you calmed down Rachel when her roommate put her into anaphylactic shock. It isn’t strange to see you as an adult because you are an adult.”

Well, duh. A slipping face mask, in a metaphor kind of way, had prevented me from seeing the vast amount of daylight between “I am growing up into an adult” and “I am growing up into a creepy adult,” and appreciating that lots of things I like about myself and my presentation in the world really do rest on my adulthood.

The social-freeloader life of a child may be freeing, but it is confining in its own way. “When we belong to the world / we become what we are,” writes Anne Stevenson. The truest expression of myself and who I can be comes not when I am starring in living room plays and getting away with murder but when I am clapping for other people, supporting friends, and held responsible for a shared project bigger than myself. To be perceived as an adult, a person who can handle difficult things and muddle through complexity, is to be seen as a citizen who is carrying her fair share in society. It may be painful to reinvent myself as I age out of one childlike persona or another, but if that persona prevents a friend from feeling like she can confide in me, then it needs reinvention.

Until last month, my WhatsApp profile picture showed me in fake glasses and a brown shirt, looking up in wonderment at a painting of a man in glasses and a brown shirt. It is not a grown-up professional headshot; it was my profile picture because a friend told me it showed off my cheekbones and sense of humor. I knew I’d have to change it at some point as I communicated with employers and connections, but I was loath to sterilize yet another manifestation of youthful quirk and replace it with anodyne conformity. I hated every replacement picture I attempted to pose for, with their strained fake smiles and giant late-capitalistic sucking sounds in the background, but whenever I contemplated switching in a silly picture I felt like a Disney adult or a sixty-year-old in Brandy Melville or some other genre of adult painfully stuck in a too-small stubbornness.

As of March, I don’t have my fake-glasses profile picture anymore. This is because the guy in the painting turned out to be in the Epstein files.

—Yona T. Sperling-Milner, an Associate Editorial editor, can be reached at [email protected].