don't let your fruit rot
how i figured out what i want in life while dealing with the desire to do absolutely everything
I am twenty-one years old and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.
My favourite cafe tops their chai lattes with dried lavender buds. I crunched one between my teeth, its taste as bitter as I felt while staring at my friend, knowing I had no answer to the question he’d just asked me.
What do you want to do?
I think I want to do everything. I want to write books. I want to edit music videos. I want to practice family law and make a shit-ton of money. I want to live in London. In New York. In Sydney. I want to be a dental hygienist, for some reason. During the winter months, I want to be a detective who wears heeled boots and trench coats. Some days I really just want to be a mother and a wife. I want to go backpacking across Europe and then Asia and come back home filled to the brim with stories.
I am hungry for it all. I am completely, utterly consumed with the desire to do, and it has paralysed me. I’m clinging to the trunk of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, terrified to move, lest a branch snap under the weight of my ambition, and it all comes crashing down.
“Have you read The Bell Jar before?” I asked my friend. “Have you heard of the fig tree metaphor?”
He hadn’t, so I told him about Esther, starving to death in the boughs of her fig tree, paralysed just like I was, watching the ripened fruits shrivel and die.
“That’s bullshit,” he said. “You can do it all. Who gives a fuck?”
He said it with such confidence and simplicity that I, who am rarely left speechless, found I had nothing to say at all.
He was right. Who cared what I decided to do? It was my life, and I had barely begun to live it. The time will pass anyway, and I suddenly remembered the point Plath was making – the only wrong choice is to not choose at all.
When our cups were empty, my friend called out a goodbye. “Don’t let your fruit rot!”
Simple enough in theory, but even with the knowledge that making a choice was the only thing I could do, I still crouched in the tree branches. It was the act of making a choice that scared me, even more than knowing that to do nothing was to waste everything. He said I could do it all, but could I? Realistically, no. I was at the end of a four-year degree and thousands of dollars in debt. Pivoting to study law was out of the question. Buying a house in my hometown only felt feasible if I won the lottery and I could barely afford my weekly petrol. Making a home for myself in a bustling metropolitan city across the world, or even just across the country, felt like a wildly unattainable fantasy.
What if I chose the wrong thing? Sure, I would have picked, but did it really matter if the fruit left me dissatisfied and unfulfilled? I stewed in this newfound anxiety for a few days until he texted me with a potential job opportunity.
It was for some office job, nine-to-five desk work. Always hiring, experience in finance advantageous but not essential. I figured a job is a job. I’ll be happy as long as I get paid.
Here’s an option, he wrote. I imagined myself in frumpy blouses, making small talk over reheated leftovers and suffering from eye strain. The thought made me want to die, just a little bit.
Don’t do it, he added. Become a writer.
And suddenly, I wasn’t sitting stagnant in the tree anymore. Reading his message made me realise the choice I had been dreading didn’t seem like a choice at all. It felt like a calling. All branches led to this one, single piece of fruit. Everything else had just grown around it. I found myself emboldened, reaching out towards the fig that, to me, had always looked the best. Sweet and juicy, fat and swollen with promise.
My writing.
Writing is my favourite thing in the world. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure about. I honestly don’t think I could live without it. I am, and will always be, a vessel for stories. I’ve pursued it without even realising. It’s never been a question to me. As long as I breathe, I will write. Once I realised that, picking the wrong fruit stopped mattering. It’s never wrong to choose the thing that makes you come alive. There are words in my veins and made-up people in my bone marrow, adventures and great loves and deep shames teeming under my skin, all begging to be shared. That’s what I want to do.
So, here we are. I’ve chosen my fruit and I won’t let it rot. Instead, I am going to eat it. Feel the split of soft flesh against my teeth, flood my tongue with flavour. Lick my lips, sated. There are a lot of things I still don’t know. When will I buy a house? Can I go back to school and study law? Will I ever get to call London my home?
Maybe I can do it all, as my friend was so certain I could. There will always be other figs on the tree, but I am holding one in my hands, right now. It’s not an easy, instant dream. I know that. But it is my dream. Even if I don’t know anything else about my life, I will always know that I chose it, that I am working for it every day. And, for now, that’s enough.