what if we can actually have everything after all?
against fig trees, constraint, and having to be a "thought daughter" to be a good writer. in favor of remembering what itt w
If you are a girl on the internet in 2024, a Bell Jar reader, or another brand of lost at sea, you are most likely intimately familiar with that Sylvia Plath quote: “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.” It runs rampant across perfect curated it-girl blogs, the mouths of TikTok users that have just added “thought daughter” to their bio, and the minds of every Gen Z woman who is surrounded by women who are successful and beautiful and have made art galleries of their lives, where everything fits into a movie narrative and every morning is the opening chapter of a novel. Every day I go on the internet (unfortunately) and I am reminded that to be anything as a girl in a large city or a pretty rural town or a coastal suburb we are subjected to so many women were are supposed to be.
I am living in the biggest city of my life in the center of the world (or so it feels) and it is the summer where I am tired of Sylvia Plath and the fig tree. This is the season where we should have no choice other than to dream stupid dreams and I am consumed by something terrifying: what if we can actually have everything after all?
The girls that I love grew up in a golden age where women could be everything and also nothing at all. We could be millionaires, CEOs, film directors, mountain climbers, snake catchers, drivers of trucks that get fifteen miles per gallon, magazine editors, and every other brand of girlboss that the internet could imagine in 2014, but I never came of age with the assumption that I could have everything.
By “everything” I mean what a lot of the men in my life were raised to expect, so subconsciously that we didn’t even know it was something we could learn to want: love, a lakehouse, children, a living wage, a job that we don’t hate, at least two hobbies, enough paid time off for one trip to Europe a year, and, perhaps most radically, the idea that we didn’t have to pick and choose what archetype of a movie character woman we would like to be. To think of our futures as fig trees is something that men don’t know how to do.
We didn’t always need to pick and choose. I was raised with freedom to be everything and so I was everything (an adventurer, a roller coaster aficionado, a director of musicals about singing cats and childhood betrayal, a nine-year-old-girl, a bathtub listener to “Car Talk,” a Disney princess). I don’t remember when I first became aware that the world wanted me to choose the type of woman that I would want to be: would you like a career or a child? do you want to see the world or do you want to have the money to buy designer shoes? do you like “bad boys” or good midwestern blondes? are you going to pick up watercolor painting in your free time or take sailing lessons at the yacht club? are you old money or coquette, or are you coconut girl or y2k? when the world ends would you like to be loved or leave a legacy?
I am living in the center of the world and, for the first time since childhood, I am skipping off the edge of the Grand Canyon. I am rejecting the fig tree that every other middle-class, college educated white girl has nightmares about. To see a future in which it is possible to have everything and to be everything is an immense privilege but if we have it then we ought to use it. It is 2024 and some of us need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves.
I don’t mean to suggest that the world is endless. Clearly far from it. I do mean to suggest that those who are loudest and saddest (on the internet) about all the dreams of theirs that will never come true are usually also those who have the most privilege to take hold of them. Believing that we can be everything is overwhelming and freeing (now I know how many of the men in my life feel).
It is clear to me where my generation of girls got the idea that we could not have or could not be everything, but it is less obvious what has reinforced this thought. The answer, I fear, is the same answer that many girls with blogs on the internet find in every problem: a rampant zombieism of consumption. The comfort of the fig tree is less about the overwhelming options of all the selves we could be and more about all the archetypes we could slip into - and to become [this type of girl] or [that type of girl] or even [that third type of girl] in 2024 requires a purchase.
You know the drill. Would you like to be a writer? Then buy enough books to fill two perfect 1970s bookcases you purchased on Facebook Marketplace and wear those Doc Martens loafers with your skirts purchased off Depop resellers. How about seeing the world? The plane ticket is affordable, but that is not enough to be a traveler: you must have the perfect “European Summer” wardrobe, the Weekender duffle bag to fit below the seat on your RyanAir flight, the Patagonia shorts so that everyone knows you like to climb mountains and you are good at it. Or would you prefer to be loved? You will need first to be beautiful (buy the glycolic acid, the retinol serum, the snail mucin imported from South Korea, the at-home makeshift treadmill from TikTok Shop so you can get skinny while you watch your favorite show, the body scrub, the essential oil that will “make your man obsessed with you”).
We don’t need to “own” anything to be a certain type of girl, or look a certain way, or dress like this influencer or that influencer. Dreaming - and becoming - is simpler than we want it to be, and we don’t earn commission for it. Existence isn’t about how easy it is to commodify our life, only how much we enjoy it, but it isn’t just about capitalism and it isn’t just about trying to be a model of woman that already has an instruction manual.
In this story today I refer to myself and a broader category of fig tree enjoyers as girls. I don’t feel like a girl in the demeaning, last-summer “i’m just a girl i shouldn’t have to do math or go to work” way but in that I’m writing this for a version of me I can’t remember. This is a pep talk for a past self, a childhood bedtime story, and most of all it is for the women and the girls who raised me and are around me.
I am reminded by them that I am already everything I have ever wanted to be: I have climbed mountains and driven rental cars to the tips of fjords, written novels and defended theses, cried over baseball players and fell in love again the next day, drank summer wine and swam in Lake Michigan in February, played tennis in July and lost my voice at outdoor concerts and spent too much money at the local mall.
Thought-provoking piece. I just finished "The Bell Jar," so I have Sylvia Plath on my mind and the timing of 'against fig trees' is perfect.