the fig tree, or the impossibility of choosing
Sylvia Plath's metaphor has been haunting me every since I read the bell jar
when i was about 8 years old i wanted to be a vet. one of our neighbours was a vet and she allowed me to assist her on a full day of work and even to witness our cat sterilisation. it all went well, i was holding the instrument until the stitching of said cat and felt really dizzy. it turns out needles freak me out. maybe i couldn’t be a vet or a surgeon, but i could be a forensic anthropologist like bones, or even a cia agent. obviously, i wanted to be a journalist, a writer, a librarian, a bar owner who writes in the back office with a cool drink. I wanted to be a fighter jet pilot, a lawyer with a Manhattan view apartment because lawyers live in NYC and drink expensive red wine after a day of work doing lawyer things.
in the bell jar, Plath uses the fig tree as a metaphor for the possibilities and choices to make. fruits start as juicy and promising, only to rot and fall, uneaten at her feet - an unsavoured life. a familiar theme to any millennial woman: the promise of a life where we can have it all, only to decay in burnout, stress and resentment. how many of us have fallen into the mirage of the dream job? the disillusion that work would never feel like work if you picked your true passion and made a career out of it. an army of perfectionists persuaded that it is on us to make it work and keep trying hard. after all generations of feminists took the barriers out of our way. unlike our mothers and their mothers before them, we have the possibility to be mothers or not, partnered or not, workers or not... we have the choice.
but it does not feel like it. and maybe we truly did have the choice, before. before the market crashed, before capitalism reached its ugly peak, before the climate worsened and the world took a turn.
it is enraging to think about the possibilities and the necessary decisions to make. picking up the juiciest fig and having to throw it away because it doesn’t pay rent and you’ve had enough of living with 12 strangers in a mouldy-noisy house. another fig wasn’t quite ready yet but you wanted it so bad you burnt yourself out trying to make it. and how many figs can you possibly pick before you get sick and settle for something else?
i couldn’t be a bar owner writer drinking her own liquor stock in a dimly lit back office. nor a forensic anthropologist like my childhood heroin or even less a lawyer in New York.
now i want a job that gives me freedom but also structure and good pay because life is increasingly expensive and i want to be able to take my laptop to a bar to write and drink - which is the closest i’ll get to that particular metaphorical fig. and sure i love being a writer by night and bank holidays, but what about a podcast? and i want to be revolutionary, have big ideas and write in lowercase, and maybe i could make a zine because that would be so artsy and intellectual of me, and isn’t that the dream?
i have a new canva addiction, and maybe i spent just a little bit too much time on the graphs - i’m an artist ok?