He was waiting at my car window, staring down at me as if he was going to burn through the glass with his eyes. My hand was shaking. I rolled down the window of my hand-me down car, and stuck my rattling arm out the passenger window. The expressionless man took it from me without hesitation, and just like that, it was gone.

I did it. I paid for my own gas.

I got my credit card back about seven minutes later. I rolled down my window and reached out; this time, it was my mind that was shaking.

My thoughts raced with ideas I never thought would cross my mind. Credit card fraud, an empty account, and bank fees went from words I heard at the dinner table to actual concerns.

I guess this is adulthood.

I had a couple of those moments. I felt I had crossed the bridge into adulthood when I got onto the Belt Parkway for the first time, but two years later when Jury Duty sent me a letter, I realized that the bridge every financially dependent child dreads isn't as simple, or as sparkly, as the Verrazano.

I thought I was an adult when I went on my first real date, but I had to be home by 11.

I thought I was an adult when I mailed my commitment deposit for graduate school, but it was out of my parents’ checkbook.

I thought I was an adult when I started teaching summer school, but then a high school junior answered a question with more insight than I ever could.

To stimulate a college interview environment, us teachers went around the room and gave each student a question that he/she would have to answer on the spot. The questions were from the College Board, The Common App, and from our own experiences, and we asked a quiet student in the front, “At what moment did you realize you were an adult?” In the time she took to think about the question, I had already thought up an answer. "Psh. I’m not an adult." She brought her eyes to the front of the room, where we waited for her answer.

Matter-of-factly, she said, “There is no ‘moment.’ It’s a bunch of moments, but eventually there is less space between them.” She continued on about moments she had as a kid, washing dishes and doing laundry, and moved on to her first time driving a car, and kept going from there.

I thought about her answer. I thought about the moments my friends and I encountered in high school that made us feel like adults until we got home for supper.

I thought I was an adult the first time I cooked my own dinner, but then I burnt everything.

But I thought about each moment; I remembered each ridiculous encounter out of my friends’ cars, every crop top, and every parent-less party on the North Shore. When I looked back at those moments, I always thought it was foolish of me to think I was an adult for driving over the bridge for the first time, or for going grocery shopping by myself. But I was an adult; for that moment, I was an adult.

I’m not a grown up just yet, but I have had more moments, and while those moments seem to get closer together, they are still just moments. Eventually, those snapshots, those freeze frames, those marks on a time line string so close together it’s as if they’re one; it isn’t until it’s your marks that you see the lines are dotted.

We're in a world of groups. Theres an age bracket for every year, and a label for every five year frame of life. These universal labels are great for schooling and CYO Basketball payments, but they fail to reflect the moment that the twelve year old took care of his younger brother, or the moment the single mother of four broke down just to wind up and recuperate with vigor. It overlooks the moment that the college kid paid her own gas bill, and fails to credit the moment that that quiet high school junior blew the mind of her teachers and peers.

There is no birthday, event, or happening that brings the dots to form a solid line marked, “adulthood.” The “kid,” “teen,” “tween,” “adult” nonsense is the product of a world that loves to label. These groupings and labels are seen with hard boundaries, but the truth is, we are all just a bunch of dotted lines.