all these fucking figs!

I think the part of The Bell Jar that stayed with me the most was the fig tree, which is probably not very original considering it's one of the most talked-about parts of the book, but whatever. I get why people don't shut up about it.

Esther imagines all these different versions of her future hanging in front of her like figs. One has a husband and children, another has her becoming a poet, another has a successful career, another has travel and experiences and a completely different life. She wants all of them, but she can't have all of them, or at least she doesn't believe she can. She can't decide which one to pick because picking one means giving up another, so eventually she imagines herself sitting there starving while the figs shrivel up and fall.

I have a horrible habit of thinking I need to know exactly what I'm doing with my life before I do anything with it. I can take a decision, turn it around a hundred different ways, think about which version of me will be happiest with it ten years from now, and convince myself that taking my time is the responsible thing to do. Sometimes it is. Other times I've taken so long thinking about my options that the decision basically gets made for me because the opportunity is gone.

I don't think my problem is that I don't know what I want, either. If anything, I think I want too many things.

I can genuinely picture myself going into pathology. There's a part of me that wants the difficult career and all the school that comes with it. I want to learn about pathogens, viruses, and disease and understand what happened inside someone's body when something went wrong. I like the idea that my work could give a family an answer when they're desperate for one. I want to know what it feels like to push myself academically that far and actually become good at something that difficult.

But I can also picture myself being a teacher.

That's actually what I wanted for a lot of my life, and somewhere along the way I started treating it like it wasn't enough.

I think being around STEM students contributed to that. There can be this weird competitiveness around what everyone plans on doing with their degree. Everyone is going to be a doctor or surgeon or researcher or something else that takes fifteen years of school and sounds impressive when you say it out loud. When you tell people you're studying biology or biomedical science, they immediately ask if you're going to medical school.

And then I start questioning myself. Like, fuck, should I want that?

There's something embarrassing about admitting that I've sometimes made my own dream feel small just because the people around me were dreaming about things that sounded bigger. Teaching has been something I've wanted since I was a kid. I like explaining things. I like the idea of taking something complicated and making it understandable to someone else. Even when I think about medical journalism, that's basically what attracts me to it. I want to take science out of this language that sometimes feels reserved for people who already understand it and explain it to the average person in a way that doesn't make them feel stupid.

That's still teaching, just in a different form.

And yet there have absolutely been times when I've thought, I'm doing all this school just to do that?

I don't particularly like admitting that because I don't even agree with myself. I don't think teaching is beneath medicine or research. I don't think someone's career is more meaningful because it required more degrees. But apparently knowing that intellectually doesn't stop me from occasionally measuring my life that way.

That's where I understood Esther's panic around choice. It isn't only What do I want? There's also Which life am I going to respect myself for choosing? Which one will other people respect? Which one will make me happy? Which one will I regret giving up?

Those are very different questions, and I think I mix them together more than I'd like to admit.

I've already had a period of my life where everything was going the way it was supposed to go and I still felt empty. When I first started college, I was doing really well. I was ahead academically and on track to graduate earlier than I originally planned. I had school organized. I had work organized. I had rekindled a friendship with a girl I'd gone to high school with because we ended up having several classes together, and it was nice having someone to go out with and make girl plans with again.

Nothing was really wrong.

But my two best friends growing up had both moved away. One went to Santa Clara and was building this new life closer to the Bay Area. The other moved to Fresno and had an entirely different environment and new beginning. I stayed around the same local towns we'd grown up around, and I remember feeling like everybody else had gotten to start over while I was just continuing the same life without them.

I had a boyfriend at the time, and he was probably the most consistent person in my life. Because my friends were gone, I spent most of my free time with him. Then I started feeling suffocated by how much time we spent together.

It made absolutely no sense to me. I was lonely because the people I loved had moved away, but I also wanted to be left alone. I was doing well in school but felt stuck. I was ahead but somehow still felt like everyone else was moving and I wasn't.

I think I told myself that maybe this was just the price I had to pay for getting the degree and career I wanted. Not every period of your life has to be exciting. Sometimes you put your head down, do the work and eventually get somewhere better.

I still believe that to an extent. I don't think every uncomfortable feeling means you're on the wrong path. But The Bell Jar made me think about how dangerous “eventually” can become when you're constantly building your life for some future version of yourself. At what point am I allowed to actually enjoy the life I'm working so hard to create?

I think that's also why Esther having so many opportunities interested me. Usually we talk about having choices like it's automatically freedom. And obviously I'd rather have choices than not have them. But there's a weird anxiety that comes with knowing several choices could lead to perfectly good lives.

I don't just have the pathology-or-teaching problem. I can picture a life where I live somewhere completely different, maybe even another country, and spend my time learning the language and culture and traveling with someone I love. I can picture having children there and raising them while still finding some kind of work that matters to me. I can picture myself studying animals and coming home excited to tell my family what I saw that day.

I can also picture myself having absolutely no children.

Maybe I live in a big city. Maybe I'm single. I work in human medicine, have friends I've made through work and going out, run through the city after my shift with music blasting in my headphones, come home, shower, make dinner and watch some shitty show. My friends stay over even though we're fully grown adults because I refuse to accept that sleepovers are something we're supposed to age out of.

And then there is probably the life I find most comforting to imagine. I live somewhere by the coast. I write from home in front of a window. I write about medicine and science for people who don't spend their lives studying it. I read constantly. I write about books too. I paint ceramics, garden, learn random instruments badly, try recipes I've never made before, and fill my house with so many pictures that nobody could ever accuse it of looking unlived in.

Maybe I'm married in that life. I like the idea of being with someone who has their own interests and doesn't need me to be involved in every single thing they do. They're somewhere else in the house doing whatever weird little hobby they've picked up while I'm reading or writing, and eventually we meet back in the kitchen and make dinner and talk about our days.

I don't know if there are children there.

That question has become much less obvious to me as I've gotten older. I was extremely maternal when I was younger. For a long time I assumed I'd have children because that's just what my future looked like in my head. Somewhere around high school that certainty disappeared. I still love children. I could happily work around them in education or pediatrics. But I can imagine never having my own and being completely okay.

I can also imagine having them and wanting to spend their first few years almost entirely with them. I'd want to watch them become people before they started going out into the world and forming all these little opinions and ideas without me. I think I'd genuinely love getting to know who they became.

Both possibilities feel true when I think about them.

That's the frustrating part. The expectations around women in The Bell Jar obviously belong to a different time in a lot of ways. Esther is dealing with a version of womanhood where marriage and motherhood could very realistically close doors that were already barely open to women. I'm grateful I wasn't raised believing my entire life should revolve around eventually becoming somebody's wife. My parents never taught me that I needed to learn how to take care of a husband or build my life around a man. If anything, I was taught the opposite: have your own skills, your own education, your own interests, your own ability to take care of yourself. I appreciate that more as I get older.

But I don't think having more freedom magically got rid of the pressure. Sometimes it feels like women are just expected to do everything now. Have a career, but don't let work consume you. Be independent, but make room for a relationship. Have children, but don't lose yourself in motherhood. Don't have children if you don't want them, but make sure you decide before your body decides for you. Take care of yourself. Have hobbies. Have friends. Exercise. Travel. Save money. Be ambitious. Enjoy your twenties. Build your future.

Okay. When exactly am I supposed to sleep?

And I don't even think all of that pressure comes from other people. A lot of mine comes from me. I want to be too many things at once. I've even done it with my body.

There was a period where I was running a lot, and I thought changing the way I worked out would make me happier with how I looked. Running is boring according to some people. Strength training gives you something more visible to show for your effort. You can grow certain areas, shrink others, tone this, define that.

So I started focusing more on that. Instead of feeling better about myself, I became much better at finding things wrong with my body.

Once I started treating my body like something I could constantly improve, there was always another improvement available. I stopped looking at myself as a whole person and started looking at individual parts that weren't quite right yet. I'm still figuring that one out. I still have fitness goals. There are still things I'd like to change. But I also know I don't want to give up something I genuinely enjoy because somebody else thinks it's boring or because another form of exercise might make my body more impressive.

I'd rather do boring shit and be happy. I think I want to apply that to the rest of my life too.

I don't want to become a doctor because it sounds better than saying I'm a teacher. I don't want to choose the hardest career available to me just so I can say I survived it. I don't want to turn something I love into something I dismiss because it doesn't sound ambitious enough.

At the same time, I don't want fear to convince me to choose the easiest life either.

That's why I don't think my takeaway from the fig tree is simply pick a fig. I'm still scared of picking the wrong one. If anything, failure scares me more than choosing a life and later realizing I want something different. I know myself well enough to know that if I dedicate years to something and fail at it, I will have a hard time not turning that failure into some larger judgment about myself.

But I also don't think every decision has to be forever anymore. That's probably the one part of getting older that has actually made choosing feel easier. I've watched people older than me completely change their lives. The career they thought they'd have forever suddenly isn't what they want. The city they saved for years to move to isn't home anymore. The person they thought they'd spend their life with isn't there. Something happens, or sometimes nothing happens at all, and they just realize, Fuck. I don't want this anymore.

Then they start again.

That used to sound like failure to me. Now I think it might just be what happens when you're alive long enough to change your mind.

Maybe that's what I would tell Esther underneath the fig tree. Not that choosing doesn't matter, because I think it does. Some choices absolutely close doors. Some opportunities don't come back. There are things we can regret. I don't find it comforting when people pretend every decision magically leads exactly where it was supposed to. But I also don't think we're choosing one version of ourselves at twenty-something and sentencing ourselves to be her forever.

Maybe I'll choose pathology first because I'm young and I want to know if I can do it. Maybe I'll love it and stay there. Maybe I'll fucking hate it. Maybe I'll teach later. Maybe I'll write. Maybe I'll have children. Maybe I'll never want them. Maybe I'll live in five different places and eventually end up right back on the California coast.

I don't know.

The thing that scares me more after thinking about the fig tree isn't that I'll choose the wrong life. It's that I'll spend so much time trying to guarantee I won't regret anything that I'll end up doing nothing.

I know I've already done smaller versions of that. I've had choices in front of me, told myself I needed more time because I wanted to make the right decision, procrastinated, overthought everything, and eventually watched the opportunity disappear. Then there wasn't a decision left to make.

That's probably why the image of Esther starving underneath a tree full of fruit bothers me so much. There are so many ways my life could go from here. Some of them probably won't happen. Some of them will happen and look nothing like I've imagined. Some things I desperately want right now might mean absolutely nothing to me ten years from now.

I don't think I'm ever going to reach a point where I'm certain enough to guarantee that I won't regret anything.

I think I just have to fucking eat something.