There’s this TikTok of a twenty-year-old roasting a millennial guy’s appearance. Screaming, howling with mirth. Something about Mickey Mouse ears, something about AARP. The video I watch is the millennial’s reply—to being accused of looking thirty, when he is in fact thirty-eight—but it is the girl’s full-chested revulsion that strikes me; her conviction that her scorn is so justified that she must upload it to the World Wide Web, where it will stay forever, her face, her voice. And I want to tell her, wait ten years. Wait twenty.

There is a memory I have: six, seven years old, searching for something in my mother’s closet. I pick up a pair of dark blue cotton shorts I think is mine, except it falls open, unfolding, twice as wide. And even then, I am imbued with enough of the poison that I dread ever fitting into such pants—a sense that to do so would be to lose some great game, surrender something I can no longer quite call innocence.

There is J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, whose older brother David dies in a skating accident at age thirteen; who dresses in David’s clothes to comfort his depressed mother. The dark closeness of her bedroom, the shine of eyes longing for the dead over the paltry living. James learning—month by month, year by year—that to die as a child is to stay perfect forever; that to grow up is to stop deserving love.

And I wonder if Peter Pan, in its way, is about punishment—Wendy becoming a woman, Peter’s failure to recognize her through the bedroom window. When her only crime was surviving.

© These Deathless Shores, Orbit

I have long been fascinated with our cultural narratives around aging. In high school, coming from a household with a limited knowledge of English literature, I mostly failed to transition from young adult to adult fiction I genuinely enjoyed. The former contained plucky seventeen-year-olds who kicked ass and shattered empires and found people who truly understood them; adults who were, if not dead parents or outright villains, then dull bureaucrats, cruel teachers, or neglectful guardians, too cowardly or stodgy or just disappointing to be heroes (or even, in a way, fully people). And then there were the books I read for class, whose protagonists—though perhaps this was due to various teachers’ personal tastes—seemed designed to be hated, racists and hapless faux-victimized rich people and other manifestations of an empty, hopeless world with no exit. Homework, firstly, but also windows into a future without magic or joy; the only vision presented to me, at the time, for what it meant to have a reading life—to belong to a narrative—as an adult.

There are kids who make the leap more easily, or at least more abruptly. I saw high school classmates carrying around Janet Evanovich hardbacks, heard of twelve-year-olds who binged Stephen King novels. But the message I absorbed, through the stories I happened to reach for, was that to turn eighteen was to lose your right to a story worth living in. That to grow up was to go from deserving main character-hood to being shoved in as a foil for someone else’s emotional arc: someone younger, braver, and thus morally superior.

During the protracted death throes of Twitter, there was some discourse on the aging up of YA: that many books allegedly published for teens are in fact geared toward older audiences; that the industry's failure to launch New Adult as a category is squeezing a substantial number of stories meant for those in their early twenties into 17-year-old protagonists’ bodies. I would like to add that it is more urgent and necessary than ever to have novels that center children and teens—that give them the chance to imagine their own adventures, and the things they might come to believe; to name the ways adults have failed them, and the shapes of their own longings.

But for that to be the only story—for eighteen to be the end—seems its own kind of tragedy.

And, too, the horror of puberty. What a friend said to me in college: that those years move men toward the societal ideals of their gender, and women away from theirs. But, as well, for those between categories, or trapped in the wrong one: the mismatch of body to sense of self. The grief and sometimes revulsion as bone and organ mold themselves irreversible, or into configurations devastatingly expensive to unmake.

Then there is the unmooring of the mind: your intentions suddenly deemed insidious, your outbursts dismissed as mood swings, your emotions meant to be weathered or suppressed rather than loved or understood. The way language carves logic out of you, makes your thoughts no longer your own.

You might still deserve your own story, at this stage, but it is already the beginning of the end.

There are books I discover when I move to New York after college—in which adults adventure on distant space ports; are impetuous wizards and heist leaders and time travel agents and forest gods. And I feel ridiculous even writing this sentence, because of course they are. Because of course I should have known.

But my first week in the city, I bought a secondhand copy of Dune, thinking to catch up on “current” science fiction; my next most recent encounter with adult SFF (that I remember) was binging C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy in tenth grade. Few people I was close to engaged with speculative fiction, or much fiction at all, outside of class. And so, by dint of suburban lack of exposure or my underdeveloped prefrontal cortex or being functionally first-generation in reading in English for fun, I simply had no idea where to look, besides googling “Best Fantasy Books”—and, at the same time, I thought I already knew.

What Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: that only white children get to be children; that queer kids and kids of color grow up “sideways,” refracted through the lens of an idyll they’re told they should have but never receive. There is the poison taint of racialization, of being treated like adults while their parents are spoken to like toddlers; the hot constant pulse of devouring shame; a pricked-ear vigilance, to all the ways you might be punished for stepping out of line.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s your mother’s trauma, buried in silence, lashing out as a temper that feels like hate. Maybe it’s the kids at school, fists or whispers or an undercurrent of avoidance, some bone-deep sense you are doing something wrong—that you are wrong, because everyone told you this would be easy.

And so you grow up cowering. You watch the adults in your cartoons—the ones who hem and haw around the children, scuttle away from their exuberant noise—and despise them for bringing into open air what you will soon become. You age straight out of shame into villainy, and the gates of the story clang shut behind you, and you know in your bones you’ll never be allowed back in.

The wardrobe. Neverland. The golden compass, symbols intuitive as a mother tongue.

The late nineties advertisement: Trix are for kids! The way you cringe with premonition, even in elementary school, because a part of you already knows. Wait ten years.

And again: I am not suggesting that children are not precious. Only that growing up does not make them less so. Only that something feels deeply wrong about our collective visceral disgust toward aging, our near worship of the fresh-faced and temporarily perfect.

Because this one story, this one divide—child, grown-up—seems to me like a shutting down of possibility, when living itself (in these times especially) is not a thing to be held lightly. Because hating and fearing what you might become in fifteen years only sharpens the knife you will plunge into your own chest.

Because it means something that you’ve survived this long—with all your wrinkles, all your scars.

The expression on my mother’s face, when she tells me about an acquaintance in her thirties who still collects Hello Kitty plushies. Her son is ten. She’s not a kid anymore.

Nothing wrong with Hello Kitty, I say. Why close the gates by your own hand?

The way I used to lie about the time I spent writing, say I was sleeping or doing homework, because writing is play (selfish, innocent, heartless) and play is always subsumable to the necessary etiquettes, the adult responsibilities, real life.

The way I just lied again: I still do it.

The Mary Oliver poem: “The voice of a child howling out of the tall, bearded, / muscular man / is a misery, and a terror.” Which I'm simplifying, of course, taking out of context. The rest of the poem is a gentler invitation, a petal-unfurling into the world: “What will open the dark fields of your mind / like a lover / at first touching?” And into freedom: “Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.” But that image of the child's voice—misplaced, allegedly; rendered broken and uncanny and wrong—it feels, taken at the wrong angle, like another thread woven into the narrative of our child-worship, our automatic protagonization of youth. The ticking clock before you’re no longer allowed to feel certain emotions, or grieve your past. When for some of us, the past may take the rest of our lives to unravel; for some of us, it curls in on itself, a re-wounding: splashed across the TV, echoed through kitchens and government halls, the air we’re forced to breathe again and again and again.

And I’m not saying we should hold tight to rotting petals, or chain ourselves to the grave. Only that there should be no time limit placed on our departure, no shame.

The first time I watch Everything Everywhere All At Once in theaters, I am struck by the way Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh are presented—not as the generic smooth-faced Hollywood types but decidedly middle-aged, grey hairs and pores and all. He looks like my former piano teacher, I think. She could be my parents’ church friend. And yet: the fanny pack swung with stunning agility. The bullet stopped mid-flight, the daughter pulled back from the brink. This is how I fight. No shame in having survived, here—in being the star of many lives, each branched out from a decision made in childhood or as a young adult: to go or to stay; to sing or chase scientific glory; to please the demanding parent, or break down, or break away.

But that these decisions could have been made at all—that all these life-paths, these possibilities, chaotic and imperfect as they are, could have been forged amid the ravages of linear time—they entail living. They entail survival. They entail growing up.

Articles Editor: Joyce Chng

Copyediting: The Copyediting Department