Sylvia Plath- The Bell Jar
I taught this novel my first year of teaching, and at the time my figs were pretty clear: find an apartment, get a job.
A few years later the figs were to have fun, go out with friends, ride horses, go to graduate school, buy my own place, get a dog, get a boyfriend.
In November 2016 I realized that I returned the tree. Did I choose the right ones? Did I just pick the easiest ones to grasp? What about the ones I didn't even see for myself when I was 21, and 25?
*
November, 2016
Even as I type this story, and the extremely literal working title, “The Birthmark and 28th Year Crisis” I feel like none of it is real. 28? When did I get to be 28 with unmemorable marks on my body, 25 extra pounds, and a “crisis” that has no name? There’s the mid-life crisis, assuming that’s actually the middle of your life, and the more newly-coined quarter-life crisis. I guess I’m closer to 25 than mid-life, but that doesn’t seem to fit either. Third-life crisis? Closer to thirty?
I’m 28. It’s a 28th year crisis. And it started when I was 27.
When people talk of being in crisis, the presumption is that there is some tumultuous catalyst, but the original meaning comes from the Greek words krinein and krisis, which mean, decide, and decision. To be in crisis means the need to decide, and to make a decision. Around quarter-life, people usually decide whether or not to settle in a certain career, or with a certain person, and start a life down one path. At mid-life, people question those decisions, and must decide, once again, who they are, where their life is headed, and do they want it to keep going that way?
To be in crisis really means to wake up, and to be fully aware of life, and the decisions to be made. It’s after those decisions are made that the crisis actually ends, and the living begins. But how long to stay in crisis? How do you know what the right decision is? (or which fig to grab?)
I had a moment this year when it just hit me that no one was going to come out of the sky and tell me that I was doing things right. That I chose the right paths, and I was headed in the right way for my “destined” life. No one can clearly affirm my adult decisions. I made decisions my entire life, into my twenties, because they were the next easiest steps, and they seemed right, and it seemed to fit what was “supposed” to happen. And here I am, at 28, in crisis of what to do next.
I absolutely believe that none of this was a mistake. I feel in my gut that everything I have done till now is what I was meant to do. The problem is what happens next. I woke up in my condo one day a few months ago, and asked myself, Is this really where I want to live? Is this job what I really want to do? And I can’t wholeheartedly answer yes to either of those questions. So here I am, in crisis of my next move. I might stay here in Connecticut. I might stay at my job, but I want to know that I made my own adult krisis about it, and decided. I chose this. I want to wake up every day, to feel alive, and to decide.
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Contrary to Plath, I don't think choosing one means losing all the rest, but I know I can't pick them all. Here I sit, back in front of the tree, knowing there are figs right in front of me, and ones I can't see from here, and ones that aren't even buds, but microscopic cells at the earliest iteration of life, and ones that are just in thought, and ones that are dead, and memories, or memories that could have been. There are those I've already picked, and kept. And those I've picked, and left.
The tragedy of the krisis would be to sit in front of the tree, as Esther had, and paralyzed with the paradox of choice, not choose any at all.
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