Future Fear

I don’t know where to go after this and I envy those who seem so certain. I know that most of the people around me aren’t certain, but I guess that from the outside it doesn’t appear so to me. And I’ve been told that it’s normal for graduates to fear the next step, but that knowledge doesn’t offer any comfort. I’ve talked to people and gotten heaps of advice and there’s really no reason for me to still say that I don’t know what to do…but I still don’t.

I’m reminded of a scene from Slyvia Plath’s Bell Glass Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel about one woman’s descent into depression, mental breakdown and attempted suicide. Amazingly, I found the excerpt I’m referring to from quotegarden.com so I don’t have to rehash it. Here it goes: the protagonist, Esther Greenwood has a dream where

“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.”~Chapter 7

Indecision really does paralyze. Maybe I should add that the choices I’m faced with are not as grandiose as hers though *laughs. I only read Bell Jar once, three years ago, but it made a huge impression on me. Since I don’t have a copy (but I think that I should get one some time), I did a quick bit of refresher background reading it and one of the themes mentioned was the fear of death. I don’t remember that featuring in the novel and it sounded paradoxical, for why would someone who attempts suicide fear death? Found this on Cliftnotes.com (I’m sorry for stooping that low!):

“Esther's anxiety about death takes precedence over all other of her anxieties about life. Esther, in fact, is so stricken with fear that she often can have no reaction at all to things that happen—except to lie. For example, when Buddy [her boyfriend] asks her how she liked watching the birth of the baby, she hedges, "Wonderful, I could see something like that every day." Yet she is, in reality, quite overcome by the "awful ordeal" that the woman must go through. And she is angered by the attitudes of the male doctors. Yet she expresses none of this, even to Buddy. Her fears and anxieties keep her from even expressing her own honest emotions. She buries those too, and thus with her lack of courage, she leads herself straight to depression.
The fear of death is the backside of the fear of life. And Esther, like a child, is fearful of life. By not expressing this and giving vent to her feelings, in some attempt to declare the validity of her reality, her life, she is thrust back to her fears and then to the ultimate fear: fear of dying.”

Morbidly I wonder if it is unhealthy to identify so much with Esther, except that in my capacity as a Christian, I do not fear dying. I just read somewhere death is only but the price that we pay for living. But I digress. The primary struggle here is with honest self-expression, probably because I am uncertain about the validity about what I feel, or why I even need to validate it.

Enough. I need to distract myself before my despondency spirals downwards any further. I was told yesterday that focusing on something else for a while helps resolve problems because it doing that allows it to die down. Might as well, though it sounds somewhat dishonest.