enliven: from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked

I have a blog post I've been writing and not writing for the past six months.  It's about women and choices and me, personally, and choices I personally feel like I have to make and want to make and need to make.

This year, I re-read Sylvia Plath's A Bell Jar.  I read it for the first time over seven years ago.  When I decided to read it again, I didn't realize how much more relevant it would become now that I'm older. 

I hesitate to say that the book made me "make a change" in my life.  Rather, it helped shift my mindset.  Often, I have felt alone in the vast future that is opening up to me and available.  I love every minute of being married to Chris.  I love the choices we've made, as a pair of partners.  And I love that we have so many options available to us.

And yet, sometimes I really despise those myriad of options.  Because they mean I have to decide.  And when I decide, well, then I've decided.  And did you know that you usually only to get to choose one thing to really focus on at a time?  And when you choose one career, others become impossible, or nearly so, and fall away? And if you don't choose and you stall and you are frozen by the fear of choosing, eventually life decides for you and all those dreams die anyway and if you don't choose, you're left alone in a tree with no figs and no possibilities.

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. (Plath, the bell jar)

Sylvia knew it.  And reading her words, and her method of explaining it, it resonated.  And I was so happy know that someone else saw a great big fig tree future and felt the same sadness when thinking about those little unfulfilled fig dreams and hopes and wishes falling to the ground once a different fig is chosen.

And it was enlivening.