My Fig Tree is Too Expansive

Graphic by Sophie Davis

When you graduate from high school, you are either thrust into the workforce or into college. No matter which path you take, people are telling you the minute you enter it to figure out what you want to do with your life. There’s no time to guess, or to fuck around and find out, no. You gotta pick. If you’re gonna spend potentially $90k on it, you gotta get it right the first time. 

I, like many others, did not get it right the first time. I came into this school wanting to be a speech pathologist, applied wanting to be a history teacher, and am now here for political science, writing articles for the best magazine on campus, with the hopes of doing it for a massive publication one day. 

You barely have time to breathe between summer and move-in day, and the worst part is how normal it is. So over our first semester together, I was trying to be a pretentious little reader, which led me to dip my toes into Sylvia Plath for the first time, and my mental health has never recovered. So I’m going to talk about why The Bell Jar truly gets me, and how it might get you, too.

There is an analogy in her novel that made me put the book down and stare at a wall for a second, thinking over every decision I’ve ever made. Here’s the quote (slightly shortened) for reference:

“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 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.”

Good God, wouldn’t that make you spiral, too? I barely know what I want to do most days– I want a happy home filled with children and love and laughter, I want to have the ability to suddenly become an Olympic women’s flag football player, I want to be a teacher and influence people, I want to write stories and articles until my eyes go square and make people feel something real, I want to be good enough for a Broadway stage–but you can’t have them all. The idea can be crippling at times, soul-crushing, and devastating. How do you cope?

I’ve read many perspectives on this analogy; mainly to see if it properly ruined everyone else who read it, and it did, don’t worry. But there was a consensus from the women who read this story. Life can be overwhelming – day by day, you make decisions that impact you horrendously, and you never know what you are going to do tomorrow. Sometimes, even thinking of taking your next breath can be awful. You want every fig, but it’s just not reasonable.

So we sit together under the tree. We take a breath, we smell the crispness of the air, and hear the rustling of leaves above us. We count to ten and look back up together. As the figs fall, we try to snatch a few. Some take longer to grab than others, and we learn together that it’s okay. Plath wrote “The Bell Jar” about her own struggles with mental health as a woman during her time period. It has gotten better in many ways, but it still feels suffocating. Sometimes all we can do is sit under that fig tree together and remind each other that we’re going to be okay. We can live together, and laugh together, and love together, and just hope that that’s enough. Because it has to be. And it will be. Somehow, it will, because it always is.