Living a Big Life (Part I): The Paradox of Depth and Breadth
Something I consider infinitely fascinating and admirable is developing expertise. And this could be an expertise in anything from baking the perfect sourdough loaf, to being the go-to attorney on land-use rules or one of the top-seeded tennis players in the world. I’m, of course, envious of someone who’s achieved high performance, but I’ve spent the last five-ish years of my life coming to terms with the fact that being a pundit of any particular field, particularly an *impressive* one, is not likely in the cards for me. Nor is this a metric by which I want to measure my success and sense of self. At the risk of self-aggrandisement, I feel it necessary to make clear that this isn’t due to doubt in my intelligence or capability, but more so due to a personality gap. As an intellectually and creatively curious person, I am ravenous to consume and metabolize everything I must to become a Renaissance woman, and to the best of my ability, no less! My desire to taste and experience many joys and interests in life outweighs my interest in reaching an ideal end point of my life knowing I am the authority on any singular point of interest.
I’ve noticed in recent reflection that I’ve grown through and beyond my Sylvia Plath “fig tree” moment as mandated by being a girl in her twenties. I am now appreciative of the fact that I have the privilege in my life to broaden my horizons, rather than be compelled, either by practical need or personal pathology, to commit myself to the idea of one certain future. Time never feels as crushingly finite as it does when you’re 19 years old, and even just these few years removed, I feel myself at 25 settling into a much more comfortable perspective. For those who may not have had the pleasure of acquaintance with this reference from The Bell Jar, I will include it here:
“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, Sylvia Plath, 1971
Yes, there are some paths I will likely never go down in my life, but having recognized that I prefer to redefine a path where I can savor as many things as possible, I feel at peace with any uneaten, or unreachable fruit.
What I find most humorous now about the Fig Tree, the metaphor that prior me held onto with buried fingernails and whitened knuckles, is the original context in which you find it. The character so ominously providing generations of young people with the perfect material to sink deeper into their existential crises, Esther Greenwood, lands on this image at the bottom of a fear spiral paved by the anxiety of never reaching her potential as a gifted student. She’s pulled straight-As, scholarships, and prizes, but she’s facing life beyond school, an adult life made up of more than just curriculums, trophies, and exam scores. Might feel very familiar to anyone like me… Quotes pulled from this passage are shared abundantly in online spaces by typically nihilistic, “burnt-out-gifted-kid,” “intellectual baddie,” “existential crisis-core” pages that recycle a predictable litany of images, from cigarettes to black coffee, and stills from Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides.” What’s often neglected when people mention Esther’s generationally haunting vision, is that shortly after this moment in the novel, she is taken to lunch by her date, and once she takes a bite of her sandwich, it “occurred to [her] that [her] vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.” The false dichotomy widely circulated implies that the character’s crisis is true, while Esther Greenwood was just hungry, and like so many of us when our bellies are empty, descended into morbidity. How much of the standard youthful paralysis is really just material conditions (undesirable job, no validation structure beyond grades and scholarships, no lunch) dressed up as philosophical crisis?
How many times have I languished in a puddle of my own tears, lamenting the fact that I’m not a better writer, or playing keys in a band, or a Team USA coxswain? How many days have I wasted, doing nothing towards my dreams of creation and learning, because I’m afraid that once I try, it will be obvious that I will fail. Isn’t nothing better than that? While this is a common experience for artists and those with many interests, it’s not, contrary to what I thought was easiest to blame, a symptom of some kind of neurodivergence or handicap that genuinely stood in my way. Far from it. This self-indulgent and self-bemoaning neurosis has been a failure of perspective, and entirely within my control.
I cannot imagine the hundreds and thousands of hours someone must put into a subject to become an authority or leader in a field, and it has only been my instinct to see those hours as sunk cost. It must take true devotion and patience to commit yourself to a topic like that. Do they ever feel limited? They must feel like they’ve missed out on other lives, right? Do they never feel alone? And what about those who put in the hours but never get the headlines—the adjunct professors, the regional tennis players, the midsize city prima ballerinas, the attorneys who never make partner? That path seems even more frightening.
In her most recent docuseries, I watched Taylor Swift, as if knowing I was working on this essay, say to her team: “everyone’s jealous of what you’ve got, no one’s jealous of what you had to do to get it.” Nothing could have rung more true, but her words also, ever so subtly, stung. Such a statement makes me wonder if I’m just rationalizing laziness.
Much like Esther in The Bell Jar, I’ve looked at my life and analyzed my future as a timeline punctuated by a series of accomplishments that lead to the end result, not as the actual process of arriving at those results. The process could not be less interesting to me, as someone so pathologically focused on the final destination. But I’m getting ahead of myself, more on this in Part II.
“The only subject I can ever imagine being a true expert in, is being myself.”
I jotted this down in my notes about a year ago when I started ruminating on what eventually became this essay. Trying new styles and genres of writing, I kept stopping quite quickly after starting a project, paralyzed by the thought that I don’t know enough about anything to write something even remotely moving or interesting. Someone who inspired this consideration of niche, subject-matter authority, is none other than novelist and writer, Elif Batuman, who from here forward I will call Elif, as though we are good friends. I appreciate the genius of Elif, partially because her “field” led her to creating works such as the novels The Idiot and Either/Or. She may be a ridiculously good writer, but these books wouldn’t exist had she not developed a wickedly deep affinity for Russian Literature and politics. What?! Yeah.
In a current reread of The Bell Jar, to put myself in the right mindset to finish off this piece, I was astounded by the similarities between Esther Greenwood and Elif’s main character, Selin. They both possess the incalculable strangeness, wit, and despair available only to a nineteen-year-old girl. What gift we have through Elif is that she is a contemporary writer who has continued to create and participate in the literary landscape. The tragic suicide of Sylvia Plath at age 31 leaves us admirers of her work with the selfish desire that she had resisted the call and could present herself in interviews and continue on to write more fiction for us to dissect and review on Goodreads.
To have a contemporary writer describe her physical body as her “mortal envelope” and inviting the idea that it exists separate from her, is a privilege. There are few authors I’ve encountered who so perfectly capture the life of the mind and the heart, with the body being but an inconvenient charge that we must feed, water, and walk. Elif has a sort of genius to her prose that I genuinely believe is a product of her high level of expertise which, as I previously mentioned, is not in creative writing or English language or poetry, but Russian literature and politics. She dedicated beyond a PhD amount of time to this area of study and didn’t go on to be a translator, journalist, or diplomat, she became a fiction writer. That being said, her niche informs her characters and her prose and her fiction writing is inextricable from the years she dedicated to a very specific area of study.
What’s obvious when enjoying Elif’s novels, The Idiot and Either/Or, is that her work, and even the culmination of her work, isn’t valuable because she wanted to be the greatest Russian literary scholar on the planet, it’s a treasure because her love of her study allowed her to live inside it fully and bring her readers into this air-tight cerebral landscape. Without coming off as trite or contrived, her novels are somehow perfect re-imaginings of the namesake writings by Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. This framework fascinates me– that such a niche can open a whole world to her. In a life like hers, it’s not the academic dedication, the completed degrees, or the depth of fluency she’s achieved that bring her success, it’s the breadth of her inspiration to use that journey to continue building a life and career that suits her.
What calms my heart is the somewhat recent understanding that there’s nothing shameful about not dedicating your life to one thing. Yes, I’ve known about free will and all that, but the rules in my head seemed strict in that I did not possess it. For me, it’s been quietly embarrassing, realizing that I had no genuine interest in dedicating myself to a path for the purposes of achieving capital “G” Greatness at the end of that line. That whatever I did, had to make headlines, in the appropriate scalable context, eventually, or it wasn’t worth even considering it. From where I stand now, I admire the experts and the PhDs and the champions, respecting the work it took to get what they have, and recognizing that no, I wouldn’t want to do what they had to do to get it.
The idea that’s finally metabolized into my ethos, is that the fig tree presents a false choice, perpetuated by fans of the Sylvia Plath aesthetic everywhere. It isn’t pick one fig or starve, it’s stop staring at the tree or thinking about the tree and start eating. What someone so practically different from myself, like Elif Batuman, taught me is that it doesn’t matter how many figs you eat or how thoroughly you eat them, it’s about how hungry and grateful you are when you reach for them. So what I’ve found peace and excitement in understanding is that my instinct toward pursuing many things isn’t avoidance or fear of missing out. My inclination to interpret my thoughts as such has been a failure of perspective, not truth damning me to the life of an imposter. The same principle operates across my multiple interests: a desire to learn, sustain inspiration, and continuously challenge myself. Being an expert in nothing but myself is actually exactly the type of life I’m grateful to lead. Why then, do I still struggle with the feeling that I’m supposed to want more?
Stay tuned for Part II if you found this interesting, or if you’ve been to the theater for Marty Supreme.
Companion artwork: Tulip Panel (Silk and metallic cloth appliqued with silk velvet and embroidered with silk and metallic-wrapped cotton threads, by Candace Wheeler (American, Delhi, New York 1827–1923 New York))
