Sitting in the middle of my very own fig tree

I have finally gotten around to reading 'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath which I have been meaning to pick up for months.

At one stage the protagonist describes her situation in life in such a way it was as if Sylvia had ripped these very feelings from my soul and woven them into this beautiful embroidery of angst. It was like a much more poetic and elegant Emma was talking to me from the page:

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 life was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another was a brilliant professor, and another 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 off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above 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.'

Women my age are very lucky to have mothers and grandmothers who fought tooth and nail to ensure we would have vastly more choices than any generation of women who came before.

We were raised to believe we could have the world; and could become whatever we dreamed of. I would never hope or wish to have been raised in any other way but it makes for a constant feeling of my limbs being tugged in every direction by all my dreams and aspirations.