“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree…”
If you’ve ever read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, or come across this passage in its many lives on social media, you already know the fig tree, the metaphor for all the possible lives you could live. Each fig is a different life. A different version of you. A different future you could choose.
And the tragedy is that choosing one means letting the others rot.
Lately, I can’t stop thinking about that image. Because at 21, on the precipice of adulthood, yet still feeling like I’ve left my sweater in the passenger seat of childhood—I feel like I’m sitting in that tree.
While I’m incredibly excited for the next decade, I am also terrified and overwhelmed. I’ve spent all this time as a teenager and child, thinking about this grand life I am going to live, writing bucket lists and envisioning the person I want to become. But when you’re younger, your future feels immaterial, fantastical and distant. You can say you’ll be a writer and a psychiatrist and live abroad and fall in love five different ways and somehow believe it will all fit.
But now here I am, arriving at the place in time that once felt imagined and malleable. Now here I am, my life no longer soft around the edges and endlessly rearrangeable. Now, every choice I make is concretely consequential.
I want to live off the land and make holistic remedies. I want to be a poet. I want to direct films. I want to be a mother. I want to spend my life moving freely through the world, untethered.
Each of these lives feels real to me. Not hypothetical, possible. And yet, I cannot live all of them.
A small example: I used to dream about studying abroad for a full year, spending my spring semester at Oxford. But ultimately, I decided I wanted to be back on campus. I went abroad in the fall and came home for the spring. I didn’t apply to Oxford. I let that fig rot. It was a conscious choice, an intentional one, but there’s still a quiet grief in knowing there will never be a re-telling of my life in which I spent a semester at Oxford. She will never exist: the version of me who wrote poetry in the gothic or medieval libraries, who formed fleeting but meaningful friendships, who became someone I had to let go of in order to be here.
And that’s okay, I chose that.
But the real fear lies not just in the choices we make consciously. It’s also about the ones we don’t. The paths we never even consider seriously enough to choose or reject. The price of being passive, doors closing as time passes that I am not aware of.
And there’s this pressure that creeps in during your early twenties, the sense that this is the time to optimize everything. To network. To apply. To submit. To build something impressive.
There are internships I should be applying for. Publications I should be submitting to. Interesting and smart people at my school I should be getting lunch with, because we will only exist in this strange, condensed proximity for so long.
And how careless, I think, not to take advantage of it!
I’m terrified at being wasteful with my one chance at existing but I’m also terrified to spend so much time and energy trying to create something grand and exceptional that I miss out on the magic of the mundane—the real substance.
So what do we do with this truth of life? How do we live without regret or what-ifs?
Honestly, we don’t. I think regret is a lot like embarrassment, you’re going to feel it at some point. The only thing you can control is how long you hold on. Because regret doesn’t change anything. And no matter what path you choose, there will always be another version of your life you didn’t live, no matter what path you chose you won’t escape regret.
In every life, some figs rot.
Here’s how I’m beginning to make peace with this.
Sophomore year of college, my friend Ellery died. Ellery had a very full fig tree. She had this ravenously creative, deeply feeling soul that could have lived so many beautiful lives in so many different ways. And now, all her figs remain unpicked on the tree, still in the sun. She’s no longer here to reach up and choose.
But we are.
We get to be here. We get to reach, to choose, to taste some and let others fall to the ground. I try to remind myself that it is an extraordinary privilege just to exist at all, to experience being human in any form.
Life is long enough to try different things, to become many versions of yourself. But not everything.
So explore. Taste what you can. Choose what feels right.
And let some of your figs rot,
because the point was never to have them all.
The point is that you got to reach for any of them at all.
And to leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favorite books, The Midnight Library:
“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”― Matt Haig