finding your figs

A recent TikTok trend has encouraged users to share their own ‘figs’ which is fun to observe but not so fun to take part in yourself. I fell victim to this trend and found myself mildly devastated.

Despite the fact that I’m only 23, I still feel like I’m running out of time. I know, I know, that’s a horrible thing to say and I know I’m not really but I just can’t shake the feeling.

You don’t have to have read The Bell Jar to have come across Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy. Both an ode to introspection and an indecisive person’s nightmare, Plath describes how life is like a tree, and from ‘the tip of each branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckons and winks’. A recent TikTok trend has encouraged users to share their own ‘figs’ which is fun to observe but not so fun to take part in yourself. I fell victim to this trend and found myself mildly devastated thinking about the avenues that my life could have gone down.

“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.” — ‘The Bell Jar’, by Sylvia Plath

Of course, it’s not a bad thing to look back on your life and wonder what would have happened if [insert minor life event here]. A little Sliding Doors indulgence here and there can be healthy, recommended even, but the danger comes when this fond remembrance turns into wistful longing.

Aging is a privilege, one that is so often lost on us. With the beauty of looking back on your life comes the mild terror of knowing that each moment in your past is fixed, immutable, will never happen again. Even at 23 I find that terrifying, knowing that I’ll never be at university again, never curl up on the tiny sofa in our third year living room with my best friends watching rubbish TV again, never live in my grandparent’s old house again. This is where the panic creeps in. If I indulge this way of thinking too much then I get overwhelmed and feel like some of my life has already passed me by. I overcompensate, and begin to mourn a future life that I’ve not even lived, a sort of parallel universe where I did better in maths and became a doctor, or found overnight success as an actress. My ‘figs’, so to speak, feel as real to me as children that I’ve carried my entire life.

some of my figs :)

But this is no way to live. I think my over-fixation on these ‘figs’, these life paths, partly comes from an insecurity of the life path I’m on now, but also from an enthusiasm for life that I find hard to contain sometimes. There’s so much that I want to do. Yes I want to travel, to see the world, but I also want to walk through the front door of my own home and put my keys on a little side table, to be able to sightread sheet music again, to speak more than one language, to be able to run a 10K, to be able to buy good quality olive oil. Small things, silly things really, but things all the same. A sense of urgency to put my name to something, to desperately carve my initials onto the world.

‘Would it be too childish of me to say: I want? But I do want: theatre, light, colour, paintings, wine and wonder.’ — Sylvia Plath

I think your fig tree only really begins to blossom in your twenties. This decade marks the beginning of the harvest, when you begin to see the fruits of your labour. Each ripened fruit is a blessing, but there will also inevitably be rotten fruits, ones that no longer serve their purpose. You accept them and set them aside, maybe even make jam with those that are too sweet. And once you feel your tree is bare, spring comes back around and it blooms again.

I don’t think you choose a fig. I think it drops off the tree when it is plump and ripe, and rolls right into your lap. Another may fall, then another and another, but never before they’re ready. I’ll let the rotting fruit fall away when it needs to, admire my harvest and move on. I know I can’t have them all, but I’m learning to make peace with that. My figs will find me!