Still under the fig tree
on time passing, decision making and learning to live
It is overwhelming to be alive, to go from teenager to young adult, from believing you know it all to realizing you actually don’t.
One day you are 18, still in high school, deciding what you are going to do with the rest of your life, which is stupid because one cannot know that at 18 (like Taylor Swift said, “How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 24?”) and the next day you wake up at 24, not knowing exactly what happened in the past six years, but somehow you finished a degree, maybe even a master’s. You survived a global pandemic, university, relationships, toxic people, life changes, losses; but you also traveled, experienced new things, learned a lot, found new interests, new friends, and saw new places. So while all of this was happening, time never stopped, life never stopped, everything kept going, life kept going, and today I sit in my bed wondering how I came all the way to this point and how or what I want to do next, which is a paralyzing thing to do.
Sylvia Plath put words to my thoughts (and almost every girl’s) way before we were born by writing the fig tree analogy.
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.……
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,…..
as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black…
Following this, I see myself just like her, sitting under a tree, admiring all the possibilities that life, the universe, or God offers me, and I cannot decide on anything. Cruelty is to see your own potential but not being able to decide what to pursue.
I’m under the tree, looking up at these branches, and the first one that catches my eye is the one I already tried: being a lawyer. I see myself being able to have a nice life, but at the cost of my dreams. I know I can be functional as a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it. It is a very dull and boring path, one that I’m certain will leave me hungry for life.
Then I look at a bigger branch, higher up, hard to reach but so full that it makes me want to try to get it: an actress’s life. God knows this is the dream of my life. I can see snippets of what that branch can offer me, but for some reason—maybe fear or not enough courage—I don’t pursue it. Every time I decide to climb the tree to get there, something makes me stay.
There are branches interconnected, for example law with diplomacy and maybe business. I can see myself doing this if I really wanted to go for it, but again, it is not something that is in my priorities. Sometimes I do think it would be fun and interesting being a diplomat for my country in another part of the world, being surrounded by international politics, history, public relations, helping; it sounds nice. Of course, there’s also business, which I don’t really think I’m capable of running a company, but I could work in this field as a corporate lawyer in international firms, which again sounds interesting and promising of a good life, but doesn’t really fill me or excite me.
I move position and I see another possibility: becoming an archaeologist or even an anthropologist. These two are exciting because they’re paths dedicated to understanding humanity through history; it is pure knowledge. There’s nothing that I enjoy more than learning, discovering, and asking the why of so many things. If I pursue one of these two, I’m very likely to end up as a college teacher, and that would be fine. I would feel like I’m living a full life, but again, something is missing.
To finish this view of the tree that presents my future, I see a new branch that recently took over: writer. Never had I thought I could write something worth reading, because even if I like to write, I do it because it is the only way I can put my thoughts and emotions straight. I can understand myself by writing (you may be able to appreciate that through my texts). It feels like the dream of dreams. I see this option as the most exciting, and I wouldn’t add or take anything from it. If one could support herself by writing and be published, one day this would be my life.
I identify with Plath in her inability to choose her path, but I differ on her take that choosing one invalidates the others. It can happen, but in life that’s not always the case. We grow, we learn, we change or in other words, we evolve. And yes, the world can be difficult and life can be stressful, but we can always change paths if we dare to look beyond our walls and the reach of our knowledge, and have a bit of self-confidence, or as I like to call it, be delusional enough to pursue the life you want without caring about the noise in the world.
Maybe one day, 30 years from now, I’ll revisit this and realize I did some of these paths or none. I fulfilled some dreams and also got new ones. I succeeded in things I never imagined and failed in others that I wanted, because in the end, life is funny that way.
Meanwhile, I’m still sitting under this tree, ready to stand up and grab a fig without thinking too much anymore (because if one keeps thinking, life will keep going) trusting myself to land where I am supposed to.
