why do I sleep with an excerpt from sylvia plath's novel under my pillow?

about illusions, fears, expectations, dreams and everything that the branches of the fig tree can bear.

My blog wouldn't be my blog if it didn't have an entry about Sylvia Plath. And I'll tell you why. I discovered her work when I was thirteen or fourteen, I was just entering adolescence, I was a lost teenager and her thoughts touched me incredibly. This post will absolutely be a stream of my thoughts, because every time I come back to it, a huge amount of emotions come up in me and I feel like telling everyone about it. This may be a bit of chaos, but it absolutely describes what goes on in my head when I start thinking about it.

For the last five moves from place to place, I've remembered to always pack a few essentials (each time it got smaller and smaller). However, I've always taken the book “The Bell Jar” written by Sylvia Plath with me, but other than that, I have a separate excerpt from the chapter about the fig tree that came from it, which I always keep under my pillow. If you don't know it, read it.

The protagonist of “The Bell Jar,” Esther Greenwood, uses a fig tree to describe her paralyzing fear of choosing a life path. As she sits under it, each of its branches symbolizes a different possible path she could choose for herself. The problem lies in the woman's inability to finally decide on something, to devote herself to motherhood and marriage? to fulfill herself as a poet? to be a well-known brilliant professor? to travel and explore the world? The choice consumes her so much that the figs begin to rot and one by one fall to the ground. And she is left with nothing.

When I first came across this metaphor, I kept coming back to it in my mind for the next few days. I had never read anything that so closely mirrored how I felt and feel. I adore that I can interpret these sentences in different ways each time. It's amazing that five years ago I was able to relate to it, now I can identify with it, and in five more years I'm sure I'll be able to too. And I have a feeling that this is an excerpt from a novel that most people will also see themselves in.

We all probably know about the phenomenon known as fomo (fear of missing out). I was talking to my mother and she said that she experienced it, in her youth because there was no Internet back then, life was different, Every invitation she received that she couldn't go to involved her regretting and wondering what could have happened? These were the most entertaining moments back then and not so frequent, so there might have been a feeling in her that she had lost something.

Now this fomo has increased its reach just through the Internet. We still feel that if we turn down an invitation somewhere, we may miss out on so much. In addition, if we do not see the new season of a popular series from Netflix - we do not know what others are talking about, if we are not on TikTok for a few days - we do not know what others are talking about, because on the Internet everyone is talking about the same thing, it is where all the trends are created, if something gains popularity, everyone wants to see it, hear it, read it, it is often the first source of information about many things. That is why, after all, it is said that if you aren’t on the Internet, you don’t exist. Probably many of us would like to live in a different reality, but let's remember - we are the ones who choose what we consume.

My “fomo,” however, is about something else. I am afraid of choosing one path for me because I feel that each would give me something unusual, something that the others cannot provide me. I would like to live in many places at the same time, and I feel that if I stay permanently in one of them, I won't experience life somewhere else. However, if I keep traveling, I won't be able to call any of them “my place,” I won't be able to truly feel at home anywhere. I would like to do many things, I have a huge number of passions that I need to explore, so much so that if I do everything “a little bit at a time,” I won't develop anything enough to be satisfied with it and be able to give myself to it. I also don't have the time and space to devote a similar amount of time to each issue and put my work into it.

Besides, probably like everyone else, and like Esther, I feel the pressure from society to make a choice, to settle down, to become someone specific, to be able to call what I do. Not to float between one thing and another. This “choice” is illusory in a sense, Esther hesitates for so long before picking the fruit because she knows that the next one might be completely unavailable to her.

For many women, panic and fear is caused by the fact that they feel they have to choose between being a mother and advancing their careers - at least for a while, and to some extent you have to give up your job to take care of your child. Often one doesn’t have the strength or time to reconcile both as much as one will want to. At the same time, if a woman aspires to become a mother, she knows that she only has the ability to do so up to a certain point.

Each path taken will give us something and bring new things into our lives, but together they will be difficult to coexist. (This was all the more evident in the system Esther had to live in). The ever-present fear of “what if?” remains. What would my life have been like if I had chosen the other option after all? What kind of place would I have been in? Perhaps much better? Is it good that I gave it up? Fear can also stem from the fact that what we choose will not be as perfect and as fulfilling of our dreams as we now imagine.

“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.”

This paralysis leads Esther to depressive states and a sense of hopelessness. All the beautiful dreams have had their expiration date, and we kept looking for something that could give us greater fullness of happiness, picking through the juicy fruit ready to be plucked. There are so many of them that choosing one too overwhelms us, nor can we ponder and postpone, because the unharvested ones will eventually rot.

At the same time, some may be more unreachable and desirable, being at the very top of the fig tree. By reaching for them, we may knock down those that are close to us. We may never be able to get that one fruit we have looked out for ourselves, and it will be too late to save the others.

Esther sat under the fruit-bending branches and continued to starve because she couldn’t feed herself and her life. Her lack of decision was also a decision, and led her to lose all option. Perhaps she didn't have the strength to reach for them and it all came down to resting idly just under the tree. This shows us that we will never be able to harvest them all, those infinite possibilities will always be tempting to us, but by choosing to reach for one fruit, we know that another must fall to the ground.

By making the metaphor so ambiguous, everyone can interpret it as they feel. It can be either the illusory nature of choice, unrealistic expectations, the influence of patriarchy, fear of the consequences of one's decision. In any of these, most people will see themselves and their view of the world, the future and the system. I, even in this, can not unequivocally advocate a theory, a great influence is the times in which Sylvia Plath wrote about it, as well as her worsening mental problems, pressure from all sides to make her life look “somehow” and the desire to have something stable. Something like an anchor that will keep her afloat and not allow her to go down.

Sylvia Plath wanted to get more out of life, and perhaps that's why she was punished for it. As a woman, she was supposed to be tied to one role. If she waited in the hope that something better would happen to her that would be “hers,” all that was left was starvation and ostracism.

Although I’m in a much more privileged place than Sylvia, I still feel that the fig tree is a very present dilemma. The number of possibilities keeps growing, and this only intensifies the feeling that there are more things to come. What are your figs? And how many of these fruits have already managed to rot?

I also publish my fig tree below.

Please share your perspective on how you understand this and if you experience it as well. Thank you for reading my stream of words and thoughts. Thank you for subscribing. Find me on tiktok, pinterest, tumblr and instagram.