I was 13 when I read Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” I can’t say it was one of my favorite books, but there was a page from Plath’s novel that stuck with me and touched me to my core — her fig tree metaphor. Plath describes the heroine’s life branching out in front of her like a fig tree, where each fig is a potentially wonderful future. One fig is finding love and raising children, another is becoming a professor, and still another is traveling and so on. Plath’s character, however, cannot choose one path, and she is stuck in paralysis. Unable to decide, she watches as each fig goes rotten and every single dream slips away. Reading this passage terrified me. I recognized the girl in the book — one so scared of making the wrong decision that she didn’t make one at all. It was me. I grew up with a million passions. I had so much energy and lust for life — I wanted to do anything and everything. I had a baking business where I would sell brownies to my middle school classmates, I learned Chinese at Sunday school, practiced seven different types of dance and had a blog and Instagram account where I wrote food reviews. I played competitive tennis, was an assistant lifeguard at a state beach and watched an abundance of rom-coms. My teachers, peers and family members warned me that I was doing too much. They said that I was stretching myself…
