response to sylvia plath

the quote that has always stuck with me

When I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one quote — the quote that has stuck with me and probably everybody else who read it goes as follows:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

My figs are not the same as hers, but they constantly grow outwards. A part of me wants to become a writer and finally finish writing that sci-fi book and spend the rest of my life writing poetry on the value & meaning & fragility of life; a part of me wants to go into the start-up world and make something of value that will change things in the world and if not the world then maybe for just one person; a part of me wants to become a quizzer and kill it on Jeopardy since Who Wants to be a Millionaire now only features … millionaires; a part of me wants to go into politics and make it on the Hill where I can claim to be a “just politician” and truly be one. But each one of these dreams are so big and require so much time and effort that doing each one of them is unfeasible.

I remember I recited this quote to one of my friends (who i think is subscribed to my substack. thanks!) and he rebutted by saying that you can pursue everything you want if you put the time and effort in it and that if you spend your time wallowing over wasted potential, you will have no time left to pursue anything. Ironic, because the last line of her quote is Plath acknowledging that this constant thinking & waiting causes all the figs to die.

If you know me, you know that every few days I go into a coping depression where I think about what I want to do in life. I go from tech to finance to my true passion of writing to putting it off for tomorrow. And then the cycle repeats because I never let myself reach a conclusion. And I realized that maybe it’s repeating because every day my interests change. When I watch an Instagram reel on the stock market, I think about how interesting it’d be to work in finance again; when I read something that moves me so much, I think about how I want to create art that has the same depth of emotion. I’ve realized that I’m constantly thinking about what could’ve been instead of what could be now.

And I wish I had a way to end this blog concisely — with this beautiful revelation. I did think about it and I had many alternate endings, some being: i am young so i don’t need to know what i’m doing in the future yet; it is society’s fault for pressuring youth (me) to know what to do in the future; that i am being pressured by external factors and not what i want so i should pursue what i truly want. And each of these holds truth in them, but they are just not enough for me.

And if there was a complete answer to how I felt, then I would not have pondered the question of my future more times than I have been willing to admit. I think maybe in two years, when hopefully I’ll still be writing this blog, I can respond to Plath again with something concrete. But all I can say now is that the one bit of reassurance (which I found through Instagrams Reels lol) is that the future is so far away and that you should pursue what you’re interested in right now, not what you think you’ll be interested in, because things change faster than you realize and the present is the only thing you can be certain of. And maybe if you’re fast enough, you’ll be able to pick & eat all the yummy figs before they die.

i know this was long so it’s very unlikely many people read it to the end but if you did, thank you & i hope u got something out of this too.

Photo by Prudence Earl on Unsplash