“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.”
Your twenties are an interesting time in your life, a time when the ‘world is your oyster’ and
the possibilities seems endless. There are so many things you can choose to be, so many
different paths to follow, a hundred different lives just waiting for you to go out and live them.
Yet, it can also feel like the most terrifying, paralysing time.
Ever since I first read Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’, her fig tree analogy stuck out to me,
however as a naïve 15-year-old the meaning largely flew over my head. It wasn’t until I
revisited it at the age of 20, the same age as the protagonist Esther, that the message truly
stuck. The fig tree perfectly represents Esther’s paralysis when faced with overwhelming
choice, she sees all the different lives that she could live; travelling, being a poet, having a
family. She becomes paralysed at the sheer number of choices she has. This leads her to
the fear of being unable to choose, and subsequently all the figs fall to the ground and rot.
To me, this metaphor captures the exact overwhelming anxiety of having to choose your life
path in your twenties. The abundance of potential futures we are faced with can feel just as
crippling as it is liberating, it’s like you’re standing at a buffet of life choices and starving
simply because you can’t decide what to put on your plate.
As humans we are taught to dream, I was lucky enough to be raised being told I could be
anything I wanted to be. As a child when imagining myself in the future I would be doing so
many great, ambitious things. I was a doctor, or an actress or writing enough books to fill a
library (heavily inspired by my ride-or-die favourite author of the time- Jacqueline Wilson).
However, as you get older, your innocence expires, and you’re hit in the face with the harsh
fact that it’s unlikely all these things possible. Plath seems to perfectly capture the endless
struggle between boundless ambition and unavoidable boundaries. The ever-apparent
tension between what one wants to do, and what one feels like they can do. This is a
predicament that many of us find ourselves falling into, there might be one fig on our tree
that looks especially tasty, one that is plumper than the rest, but in our mind that fig is harder
to reach, it’s right at the top of the tree. So, instead we stand at the foot of the tree, unsure
what to do next.
It’s important to note that for Esther, society largely dictated her choices when it came to her
future. Being a young woman in 1953, society wanted to keep her domesticated, limiting her
future options to housewife and mother. Esther feared these limitations would ruin any
chance she had at a fruitful future. For me, I am faced with too many options that I know I
would love, no one is telling me I can’t be something, and that’s where my paralysis lies. I
am all too aware of all the endless opportunities there are out there, but how will I choose
what I want to be? Will I choose the right option? It’s not lost on me what a privilege this is.
All too often there’s too much pressure to feel like you know exactly what you want to do in
life. I feel like I’ve stumbled through life, doing what I thought was expected of me and now,
here I am, nearly 21, nearly graduated, and no clue what is next for me. I look to my future
and wish I could see one big, juicy fig daring me to eat it. Instead, all my figs look good but
none of them are calling out to me. Despite the pressure I may feel when I look at my friends
with clear futures laid out in front of them and the disappointment in myself that I’ve got this
far and am yet to find my one true ‘passion’, I know that my overgrown fig tree, is better than
a tree with no figs at all. As Mary Schmich said in her famous Wear Sunscreeen poem,
“don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what to do with your life”. The most interesting people I
know didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-
year-olds I know still don’t”
Although scary, the future and the unknown should also be exciting. It’s exciting to finally
make your mark on the real world, to feel the inevitable freedom that comes with adulthood.
Gone are the days of having to answer to others, whether that be teachers or parents, you
have no one to answer to but yourself. This is one of the drawbacks of viewing the future in
the same way Esther does, how can you fully embrace the path you have decided to take if
you’re too busy mourning everything you’ve had to refuse? Before you even make up your
mind about what you want in the future you are prematurely yearning for everything that
could have been. There’s nothing to say that the career you choose, or the city you live in, or
the people you surround yourself with at the age of twenty are not subject to change. That’s
one of the great things about the independence that adulthood gives you- you are the one in
control. If you don’t like something, you can change it. You can eat more than one fig in a
lifetime.