The Girl With Eighteen Fig Trees and No Ladder

“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.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

I first read Plath's work at sixteen, and it was her fig tree analogy that struck me with an inordinate sense of being known and understood like I had never experienced before, and how remarkable it was that this came from a woman seventy-five years before myself. It was the first time anyone had delineated so intimately this indecision in me; a desire, always lingering, to remain amorphous and protean, undefined by a single profession or ideal; that perhaps in my reluctance to choose a sole version of myself, I was passively, poetically, allowing opportunities to slip past me untouched and left to rot just as a fig unpicked.

My figs? I dream of being a New York Times Bestselling author. Writing on the subway, coffee and cigarettes. Seeing my name up in lights, gold embossed along the spines of books thick and heavy in my arms. I dream of moving to Paris, wandering the catacombs, living in a tall apartment overseeing the Eiffel Tower- or perhaps the countryside, strolling wine vineyards and sleeping above my own boulangerie. I dream also of being an English professor at Oxford. Mary Janes and a blazer. All my Dead Poets Society, The Secret History imaginings. Study archaeology in Greece. Live in a tiled flat as an artist in Lisbon. A rockstar girlfriend in the Hotel Chelsea. Manhattan fashion designer. Indie film director. 1950s Hollywood starlet. Vintage Americana diner waitress. A 2013 teenager in Bristol. Prima ballerina touring Europe. A wife, a mother, somebody to love and be loved. I dream and dream and dream of selves that cannot exist and I ask myself, what am I supposed to do with all this... All these dreams and all these lives I cannot have?

As a child, I looked at my big sisters and saw certainty. Everything they did seemed to me sourced from an innate sense of animated direction. That in birth, their becoming was already fossolised beneath the cloths of their skin. They picked their figs quickly, proudly and without tremble. An accountant. A veterinarian. A beautician. I have for so long lingered in this liminal space between child and woman, expectant I suppose that such certainty would arrive as it should. Like a cutie mark or prophecy of Delphi, I would know who to be and what to do with my one life because everyone does, eventually, right? But I have never experienced a divine epiphany, only the endless scrolls of girlhood I could borrow and discard as I will. Ballet flats on Wednesday and black eyeliner by Friday. I wait for something to stick: an identity to root itself in me and bloom. I am today a collector of aesthetics and alter egos. The girl with eighteen fig trees and no ladder. I wander the multiplicities of human experience through observation and online personas, living vicariously through Pinterest boards, travel influencers, strangers I encounter between tram rides, and visions I convoke via fashion choices.

I scroll job listings and university pages and I still don't know. Ancient Greek. Ancient history. Anthropology. Archaeology. Art history. Creative Writing. Criminology. English. Fashion school. Film studies. Geography. Nursing. Philosophy. Psychology. Theatre. It is a terrifying, wonderstruck feeling, this uncertainty, the knowledge that I at any moment can change my life in often the smallest of choices. I have no grand conclusion to offer. I don't know what I'm doing either. That's all.