I have no idea what I am doing with my life...

I have been in a writer’s block for the last few months because, to be honest, I have no idea what I am doing with my life. Last month, I started a blog post on waiting rooms - The stretches of time that feel suspended between who you have been and who you imagine becoming. You sit there, hoping that something will eventually call your name, unsure of when, or in what direction. I feel as though I am back there.

In my early 20s, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath offered a language for this feeling (shown below). The fig tree. The branches. The abundance of lives, each one vivid, each one requiring the death of the others. Fresh out of my bachelor’s degree, I understood myself as a set of potential selves, each waiting to be chosen. What I did not understand, at least not yet, was that choosing is not a single act. It is the rhythm of a lifestyle.

I began, as many do, with the path that made sense. Corporate Structure. A version of myself that was legible to other people. She was successful in the ways success is typically measured. There was a clarity to her life that I admired. And still, in the evenings, I would dream of another version of me. She lived somewhere else entirely. In Italy, perhaps. She spoke another language. She cared about different things, about beauty, craft, the feeling of being moved by her own life. She was not more real, exactly, but she was more alive to me.

Now, I am living my European adventure and still I unexpectly find myself back at the tree. The branches are different, but the feeling is the same, and this time I have no idea which path to choose. Do I stay in Europe, trying to get a job? Return to the United States and reassemble a life I already understand? Step further into uncertainty and attempt something of my own? Choose love and build a professional life that is smaller perhaps, but more grounded in family? In truth, I want to live all these lives but again the longer I take to decide, the more worried I am of running out of time.

But writing this, I have realized that maybe this waiting and choosing is the rhythm of life. We speak about decisions as though they are final, as though they seal a version of the future into place. But most choices are less decisive than that. They are simply experiments. You step onto a path, you try it on, and in doing so you learn something that was inaccessible to you before. The self you become along the way is not a fixed destination, but a response.

What I misunderstood about the idea of the fig tree is the quantity. There is not only one. You do not sit beneath a single set of branches, watching the figs wither as time passes. You move. And as you walk there will be another tree, with other branches filled with figs. Always repeating the pattern of growth of finding new trees until deciding it’s time to carve your initial into the bark and stay.

The waiting room, then, is not a pause before life begins. It is part of life itself. A place where you gather the courage to move without certainty, to trust that becoming is not a single, irreversible act but a series of returns to yourself, each one slightly altered. I still do not know which path I will choose next. That uncertainty has not disappeared. But it feels different now, this next path I will walk down will lead me to another tree, more figs, and endless opportunities to change. We got this.

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

“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 another fig 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 offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, 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.”