One Fig For Many

I told my mom I was going to be an author. That was before I told her I was going to be a singer. Then, I told her I was going to design clothes. I told her I was going to have four kids. Then three. Then none. I was going to run a White Mouse Circus, like in Roald Dahl’s The Witches. I was going to open a book shop, a flower shop, a coffee shop—no...not a coffee shop. I didn’t like coffee yet. I was young. I couldn’t tell you what age. I told my mom a million different things: marine biologist, stage manager, chemist, therapist, rock climber, professional embroiderer, equestrian, veterinarian, professor, priest (I’ve never been catholic, nor male). Eventually I stopped telling her what I was going to be. But the ideas kept coming, the branches kept growing. My mind’s attention kept dividing. And I fell, over and over, into the imagining of my lives.

I’m twenty now, and I’ve lived everything. Or maybe, I’ve lived nothing. I have to remind myself that living and imagining are different. I recognize that I stand on the edge of my one official “life,” as I continue to question and be questioned on my path, my plan, my branch. My future branches out before me like the green fig tree, and my past spreads beneath me like the buried roots of my memory.

Maladaptive daydreaming: a behavior where a person spends an excessive amount of time daydreaming, usually a coping mechanism in people who have mental health conditions like anxiety, for some this disrupts work, hobbies or friendships and relationships (Cleveland Clinic). That was the diagnosis I recall. This all encompassing term began to explain my overly crowded recollection. I remember a dozen lives, none of which were ever officially mine, but are instead recognized by my mind alone. Day after day of my childhood were spent in a daze, dreaming of what life could be. What I could be. I’d imagine the versions of myself that I could never explain out loud. The version that married the smartest boy in class. The version that was smarter than that boy. The version that did everything. The version that I envied. I imagined the concerts I’d perform, the fashion runways I’d be responsible for, and the exhilaration I’d feel effortlessly climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome. I look back on the expanse of my childhood and all the lives that characterized it, and all I see now is a fever dream. I feel the exhaustion of all the careers I can never put on my resume. I feel the lingering love of all the passions I’ve mentally pursued. And in this state of imaginative burnout, I awake to find myself gripping onto my future, like the bark of the green fig tree.

I never truly quit my maladaptive daydreaming habits until I moved for university. Like waking from a coma, I opened my eyes to a brick dorm building. I looked around me at eager and nervous faces, individuals gripping onto suitcases and brown boxes, and I recognized this as the “life” everyone had told me about. For the first time, I was able to remain present throughout a day, without escaping into some alternative creation of my mind. I dug myself out of the soil, no longer clinging to the roots of the tree, and fixed my eyes on the deep canopy of branches decorating my view.

I’ve been living the same life for the last three years, occasionally being struck with memories from my childhood coma. Now I near graduation, and my eyes trail every potential path that feeds my sickening ambition. I’ve majored in two different educational disciplines and I fight the threatening urge to add on a second and third minor, to study every subject tickling my fancy in pursuit of tasting every single fruit. The clock counts down to that dreaded diploma day, and instead of feeling the overwhelming desire to declare the subject of my eternal dedication, I find myself haunted by Sylvia Plath’s fig tree,erected from her confessional poetry. It calls for a confession of my own. I want each and every fig. I fill pages and pages of my notebook with step by step guides on how to knit and identify every flower by initial glance, with research on masters programs and mental health clinics, with every dream and fancy and opportunity I’m mad enough to crave. I sketch every fig I can stand in between the lines of that book. I sketch and sketch and I write and I write and write and write and...

I’ve trapped myself. Thinking myself free of my previously suffered coma, I thought it safe to put my imaginings into ink and onto pages. But I fear I’ve cultivated an addiction to the  ever so familiar indecision. Writing is the closest I’ve gotten to satisfying that urge to climb every beckoning branch of that fig tree. It’s the closest I can conceive of myself becoming everything. The closest I can get to starting a matriarchy, solving an eerie mystery, sailing the expanse of the pacific, becoming a member of Oxford’s All Souls College, leading cultural revolutions, or having my name accompany Abraham Maslow’s in Psychology textbooks. I worry that this opportunity to be everything is only a disguise for my destiny to be nothing. Is it power to write and craft all these lives? Or is it a trap, damning me to never truly live? To never officially experience? To fall further into an imagination that continuously upstages the reality of who and what I am?

Is the craving for every fig simply a sickness setting oneself up for inescapable madness? Could writing be the cure? Is this particular fig the solution to the impossible decision of choosing a branch? I cling to the bark of the green fig tree, splinters digging under my fingers, scrapes decorating my shaking legs. And I try to make up my mind. Is it mad to think I can have one fig satisfy the desires for many? Or is madness my necessity to living? Will I starve reaching for one fig, or will I starve craving many?

“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.”

-        Sylvia Plath