The 'Always' and 'Never' Life of Sylvia Plath I shared the article with my DD13, who strongly identified with Plath's description of the curse of multipotentiality (described in
The Bell Jar):
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 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.
Oddly, my DD found it comforting that someone who understood this from the inside out had articulated this dreadful existential puzzle so clearly.
