“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.” While only one page of prose from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, this fig tree analogy has always stuck with me for its message on yearning, dreams, and almost debilitating indecisiveness.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.”
Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar”
Within the metaphor, the protagonist Esther Greenwood imagines her life akin to a sprawling tree, each ripe fig a different path she could traverse in life.
I’ll give you some of my “figs.” Growing up, I always told people my dream job was to be Indiana Jones, fit with being a history professor by day, treasure-hunter by night. I still want to be that–adding into that cultural repatriation–and use my anthropology degree to find magnificent artifacts from classical Greece and Rome, or ancient Egypt, that bridges great gaps of knowledge.
Another part of me wants to be an FBI criminal behavioral analyst, like my beloved Maggie O’Dell, Spencer Reid, and Clarice Starling characters I so covet. I want to work for the Behavioral Analysis Unit with an impressive mastery of forensic linguistics, and seek justice from a psychological perspective.
I want to be an actress on the NYC Broadway stage, channeling the theatre kid of my youth, through wildly impressive riffs and dance breaks. I’ve always wished I pursued this dream of mine further, instead of trading my character shoes for pom-poms in high school.
I want to be a writer of intensely captivating fantasy novels, who owns a cottage in the south of France and goes to the local boulangerie daily for my fresh baguette that I pensively chew while sitting next to the sea as I write, using my quaint surroundings and unavoidably charming neighbors as inspiration for my settings and characters.
I see myself as an art curator, alternatively at my esteemed MET in Manhattan or a local Laguna Beach gallery, working with and interpreting exquisite pieces all day long. I want to research Impressionism, Rococo, and everything in between, building exhibits that communicate great themes of tragedy and sorrow and celebration and community.
While some might relish in the anticipation of the multitude of paths life could take them down, in the face of all these great aspirations and complex, seemingly unattainable goals, I feel rather the opposite. It feels daunting and, at times, cripplingly intimidating. Just as Plath’s Esther felt, I feel myself “starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.”
I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment. I avoid thinking too hard about the future, as I find it brings me fits of anxiety and worry about how whatever I choose to do in life, it’ll never be enough. I find myself growing numb when choosing my classes for the next quarter, or applying for jobs, due to the suffocating sense that by choosing one, I completely lose chance on the dozen others.
At its simplest, and most readily available form, this fig tree prose is about how when faced with large life decisions, it becomes all too easy to freeze up. Decision paralysis is apparently eminent– but it doesn’t have to be.
At a not-so-shallow look, you can read Plath’s words and understand how Esther doesn’t feel upset because she picks the wrong fig, but because she is too caught up with doubt in deciding the “right” fig, that she doesn’t choose any, and they all end up rotting at her feet.
The worst part about life isn’t picking the wrong dream, but watching all your dreams disappear because you’ve held yourself back and wasted your life deciding. Stop imagining yourself as the hapless sitting-duck who must decide which path to throw yourself down, and redraw yourself as the fig tree who has the opportunity to grow such vibrant, illuminating passions for yourself.
People don’t read the very next page of The Bell Jar, either. Right after Esther has this unimaginable bout of anxiety, she goes to a restaurant, has a meal, immediately feels better, and voices, “It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
“It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar”
Now, this epiphany does not negate her woes and anxieties, but it contextualizes them in the grand scheme of life. It reminds us that while we worry and agonize over these large decisions, we forget about the present, and what is going on in the moment. It reminds us that even in times of great concern, you will eat again. It is too easy to imagine this ability to choose your life as a burden, that you forget what a gift it is.
I won’t tell you not to worry about your future, and that you won’t feel unfulfilled or uncertain about whether the decisions you’re making are the right ones. I can tell you, however, to choose. Making a decision isn’t putting all your eggs, or rather figs, in one basket, but beginning the first switchback in the great odyssey that is life. Worst comes to worst, you pick a new fig, come the next season, when the tree has blossomed and reached out to you again with ever tantalizing fruit. Reach out, though, and taste, instead of watching your life pass before your eyes.