Figs

I was a sophomore in high school when I first read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I picked it up after reading Lady Lazarus in my English class, a poem which ranks higher than many others I’ve had the pleasure of reading. I remember looking around the classroom to see if anyone was as affected by it as I was, but no one seemed to be paying attention in the first place. 

When it comes to The Bell Jar, I would be a fool to deny that I did not have the capacity to understand the gravity of it at the time. Maybe I still don’t. However, it did paint a layer of sadness within me that I haven’t been able to peel off. I don’t know if it’s because of the sheer misery that lies in the spaces between every word or the concern that arose within me when I realized I related to some of the things she wrote. Maybe it was the fact that I knew how tumultuous her life was towards the end. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I know how it ended, how devastating it is that everything she ever wrote is marked by her suicide. 

I reread The Bell Jar last fall.

Between my sophomore year of high school and last fall, I read her journals. Everything changed. Now, I can’t even imagine how it felt to read the pages from The Bell Jar without knowing what her life was like at 17. How she didn’t want to die. How she was young and fresh faced, so sadness was a feeling that came and went. I do remember how beautiful it was to read to someone describe their emotions so gently and somehow remain so jagged. 

I’ve never once wanted to die, but I have the human inclination to think about it. What comes next? What if I did? How would people react, what would it do to people, would I be able to watch the aftermath like a friendly spirit overhead or would I just cease to exist? Would there be nothing? Would I even know it happened?

I don’t think about it often, but when I do, it consumes me like most of my feelings do.

Plath writes about how she doesn’t know what it’s like to not have deep emotions. But even when she feels nothing, it’s heavy. Even nothingness places a weight on her being. Now, I wouldn’t call myself an outwardly emotional person, but there are so many feelings within me. They constantly threaten to shoot out like splatter on a Pollock painting. I keep them to myself but I feel them in a way I cannot compare anything to. They are messy, beautiful, colorful and almost violent. 

I don’t know if other people feel this way. 

Maybe that’s the burden of being a writer, especially as someone who tends to write about myself and my experiences. Even when I write under the guise of a character, my consciousness streams into the words. It is hard to separate myself from anything I’ve ever written, whether it’s a history essay, a novel, or something reflective like this. Every feeling I’ve ever had will always run through me even if it fades. The thing about fading is that there will always be the shadow of what once was. 

It’s simple really. 

If you cover a tattoo with another, that doesn’t mean the original one isn’t still beneath it. If you put up a new billboard, people will notice that the old one is gone. Tearing down a building will just lead to people discussing the one that stood in its place. 

When they closed the Blockbuster above the supermarket by my elementary school, they didn’t erase it from my memory. Every time I see that Supermax I look up to the second story and think of that blue and yellow sign. 

Every single time I drive past my old house I think of what it was like to live there, and even though I don’t live there anymore, a piece of me always will. Before we moved out I left my name in pencil above my bed, in the corner of the ceiling in my room. I wonder if they painted over it… if they’ve even noticed it is there at all. There was a winter where I planted strawberries in the backyard, right next to the palm tree on the left hand side. They died after they bloomed but I’m sure the seeds are still waiting for rain or waiting for me. 

The point of it all is that when she was around my age, she began to look at her life in a different way, one that I find myself in now. 

In the bell jar, Sylvia Plath presents the most life-changing analogy I’ve read to date. The fig tree.

When I read it at 17 I was still floating. My roots weren’t deep and I had nothing but blossoms on my branches, still malleable and easy to snap off. Nobody could climb me without risking a fall. I was waiting for bees. I was basking in the sun and awaiting the end of summer. Bright eyed. Riddled with possibility. In a way I still am. I might not float as high anymore but my feet barely graze the ground. I've come to realize that I am not even a fig tree anymore. Rather, I’m standing before it with a basket in my left hand and my right hand extended and ready to harvest.

I’ve always had big dreams, my aspirations have never really changed. They remain within the same realm, but sprawl out into different territories like exits on a highway, each leading to their own town under the bridge. 

My first dream (or fig, in this case) is probably unsurprising. 

I wanted to be a fashion designer. That was my dream. In the first grade I wore a Peaky Blinders style hat in black, a pink cardigan, and a plaid skirt that complimented it. I had white frilly socks on and Mary Janes with gold stud earrings for career day. I wanted to be glamorous and design poodle skirts. I had just watched Grease for the first time. I lived off the mainland but I wanted Americana. It’s the first thing I ever wanted to be. I can’t draw to save my life. I treasure that first fig. 

In the fourth grade I wrote a series of stories with two of my friends that are still in the library at my elementary school to this day. Fame to Shame was the three part story of three pop stars whose fabulous lives were stripped from them. It was a Hannah Montana meets Cow Belles book with hand drawn illustrations. (One of my co-authors wanted to be a movie star at that point, so she wrote a script and held auditions. My friend Oliver received the role of the dorky love interest from the countryside. His father is British, so Oliver had an accent with certain words. It was precious. He passed away two years later, in June. Oliver was my first real loss. I miss him. Certain words remind me of him. I hope he’s okay.) 

I loved all of that, writing and editing and letting my imagination run so wildly it couldn’t be contained. I was the tallest girl in school. I was all legs and arms… long and lanky and uncoordinated. I had braces and still wore my hair half up and half down to keep my wild curls to myself. They were only set free when I was home and nobody could see them. When I wrote, none of it mattered. I was just a 12 year old artist. Nobody gave a shit about my braceface and childlike unruliness. I was just Nanna, a writer!

My dream was set. A writer. My destiny.

As I got older, that dream of writing never changed, but it got more complex. What type of writer would I be?

Would I write about breaking news? Could I live with being the regular bearer of bad news? I have started to realize that every single time I turn the news on, I roll my eyes at the newscaster. I hate them for always telling me what’s wrong with the world, so I can’t be someone I detest. The fig fell at my feet, and I hadn’t faced rotted fruit like that before. I kicked it away.

Will I write creatively? Can I be an author like I have always wanted? I wrote my first book my junior year. Nothing has brought me joy quite like that did, but how realistic would it be to pursue? Who gives a shit? So that fig remained. 

Would I write like this? What if I just spew every thought that comes into my brain on a website I pay to keep as mine? I love this, but I don’t really want to just talk about every emotion I have all the time. And again, how realistic would it be to bank on this? Does it matter? Fig.

I love fashion! Maybe my first grade self had it right after all. I’ll write for a magazine. Print is dying, they said. I pruned the branch it grew on. I bid it adieu.

Music! Rolling Stone! Rob Sheffield and rock and roll. I could write essays about music. I could write books. Dream acquired. This fig is the one everyone wants a bite of. Everyone knows about it because I made sure to tell them it’s what I wanted. I was much younger then, and still old enough for people to remember and ask me how my dream is unfolding. 

I don’t really know how to answer that anymore. I don’t really want that life like I used to. 

I am 20 years old now, and though in the grand scheme of things that is still young, I am not as green as I once was. I am not the fig tree anymore. Now, I just climb its branches and harvest. Now, I just prune the decay and watch as the oldest figs begin to ripen and fall before my feet. 

What to do? What to pursue? I am so afraid of finding myself starving because I cannot decide. I am terrified that if I wait too long all the figs will die and I’ll be left just climbing the tree looking for new ones, except they never come. I want so many things. I have so many dreams. Every day I juggle the possibilities, the different directions my life could go. I’ve always been certain but I want to write, but every single fruit I have to pick from leads into another direction. And if I choose one, I abandon another! 

What if I choose that first one and end up writing articles about people who are changing the world instead of those who are destroying it? 

What if it doesn’t matter that print is dying? What if I get to sit front row in Milan during fashion week, comparing dresses to sonnets and runways to my favorite songs?

What if I can spend my life within characters and creating worlds out of my own wildest dreams? What if I get to change lives with my words the way that mine has been changed?

What if I get to listen to music every day and write about the way it makes me feel?

What if I don’t get any of these dreams? What if my basket is empty and I’m sitting on a branch just waiting for it to snap? What if this is it, and I need to decide now because the next few years of my life define what I do with the rest of it?

I don’t want to end up like Sylvia Plath, with wrinkled black fruit lying around me because I cannot decide in time. And no, that is not the point of the analogy, but I can’t help but look at it that way sometimes. 

Every now and then I think of it, more often than not I avoid it.

I don’t want my dreams to fade away. Earlier I wrote about how fading will never equate to being erased, which is a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, I wish I could forget about some of my dreams because it makes it easier to follow just one and it wouldn’t tear me apart the way it does, but I’m glad I have all these figs. I’d rather be torn over dreams than struggle to find one. I don’t know what’s more difficult of the two, but at the end of the day, everyone is just looking for a dream regardless of whether they have any or not. 

I imagine myself before my fig tree, a few returning to the earth ready to give their seeds to someone who needs them. I smile at them and look back to mine. My left hand is still holding a basket, and my right hand is still extended towards the sun and the fruits that grow beneath it.