The fig tree (you're sick of it, I know)
I have refused to read The Bell Jar if not in its original English. Back at home, a copy of it was already a bit costly; not insanely so, but enough that it was out of budget to ask for it as a birthday gift (I'd look too greedy), and it would require me to purposefully save up for a month or two to buy a Spain Spanish edition of it. I felt that would simply feel like a disservice to the fundamental girlhood experience that reading The Bell Jar is said to constitute.
I found a second-hand copy that was cheap enough, and I did not hesitate to buy it. Right now, I have reached it. You know what it is. The fig tree (I genuinely had to take a moment and write this).
It's just two paragraphs, but it punches you in the chest. I have read the passage so many times already as someone whose primary platform is Tumblr, and I still had an almost visceral reaction when my eyes found, “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.” I sat up and braced for what I already knew came next. It is certainly different to experience this passage in the context of actively reading the novel, and not just as a cut-off quote with some Pinterest pictures made into a moodboard to be posted with hashtags. The wait was not only worth it, but it was meant to be.
I start university this fall. "For the first time in my life [...] I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along. I simply hadn't thought about it." I have always thought about it, I've made myself want to die under the weight of my perceived lack of. This inadequacy, however, is statistical. I come from a country with a level of compulsory education that is not only pathetic, but an outright joke in comparison to the one the average student here have had. I am losing, and the race has not yet started. I lost it the moment I was born where I was born, and this is the desperate attempt of those who feel there is no future back home. A fight that will extend all throughout my degree, and then the obligatory master's to even qualify for the workforce standards here, then a doctorate, because you are only as good as the institutions in your qualifications. You need to bleed yourself dry and thank them for giving the third-world-country immigrant a chance. I find myself already resenting this place as well. Suddenly, my land feels warm again.
But what about my fig tree? I have figs. I don't know if I ever had a tree. I think I am starving to death, and there's a basket in front of me; the figs have already been picked. They are all already wrinkled and black. One fig was a ballerina, all rosin and tulle, and suffering given shape, and another fig was an oil painter, and another was a veterinarian who ended up turning her home into a shelter, and another was a wife who managed to build a stable house with a devoted husband, and another was an accomplished writer whose words were remembered even after they were gone. In the end, I have no choice but to take the only fig that doesn't look spoiled. I need to not starve to death and make it through winter. It is sour like you wouldn't believe, the inside a watery sludge that spills all over the moment I sink my teeth in. Engineering.
I never stood a chance.
I have been mourning my future since I was thirteen, and I decided to hate the country I was born in with a fiery passion. The people, mainly. The land is alive and blameless. The blame is ours. Now I am so far away, and I hate their people with a passion already. Maybe that's my problem, how much I hate, how instinctively I do so.
My choice of fig can be a sob story, a reminder of how following your dreams is a privilege that's scarce. But it was never a choice at all; it was just the next logical step to avoid more struggle, even if it meant struggling with something I am not good at and have no passion for for the rest of my days. I don't know what to say, really. Whenever I think about this I just feel hollowed out. I think I was hollowed out the day my teacher's berating made me so scared I left ballet. I am an adult now, and I cannot dance without feeling ashamed and unworthy. I cannot see anything ballerina-related without the tears and the stabbing pain in my chest (That was my fig, that was always my fig). I must sound very dramatic, and I must be, either that or I am the world's most emotionally fragile person for some things.
Hate. Hate. Hate. If anyone reads my other entries, that's the pattern that will quickly take shape. I'm working on it. I suppose I will be 'working on something' for a good while. I just hope the journey is not too painful.