Between Plath and Didion: the most important lesson I learned in my 20's
Approaching my 30th birthday, sharing the thing it took me ten years to figure out
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I was awoken by a 5am wakeup call from the hotel front desk. Outside my window snow fell thick and fast. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and shuffled to the hotel bathroom, skin white and drawn beneath the bright fluorescents. As I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and put on my suit, tears flowed soundlessly from my eyes, a dead, helpless sort of cry. I was in Ontario, Canada, on my way to do a presentation on corporate nomenclature for an industrial shredding company. I hated my job, hated my life. How had I ended up here? I had loved school, navigated college with ease, enjoyment, and confidence. I had thought the working world and my adult life would be more of the same. Onwards and upwards. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath at the beginning of my twenties. I instantly connected with Esther’s ambition and angst. There was one quote in particular that I felt perfectly encapsulated how I was feeling at the end of my college years, about to enter the working world:
Then, last week, on the metaphorical eve of my 30th birthday, and almost a full decade after reading The Bell Jar, I began reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. I found in its pages a quote equally as striking—and true—about being poised at the starting line of your adult life:
But despite each quote’s resonance, they offer two divergent pictures of life as a twenty-something woman. Each speaker recognizes that this stage as a nascent adult is singular and precious, ripe with possibilities and potentialities—but their approach to that ripeness is so different.
Esther’s attitude (and Plath’s by proxy) is characterized by fear, Didion’s by flippancy. They sit on two opposite ends of a spectrum. Esther believes she must choose one path forward, and that choosing one path means “losing all the rest.” Didion believes all choices she makes at this point in her life are revocable, and that “none of it would count.”
Neither mindset is effective. Plath’s is paralyzing, applying a pressure and permanence that is almost sure to negatively impact decision-making. Didion’s is dismissive, a point which she makes later in her essay, admitting that, at the end of her twenties, she realized, “some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
In terms of the aforementioned spectrum, at the beginning of my twenties, I was a Plath. I thought whatever career1 I chose had to be the career. I didn’t want to waste time. I needed to make the right choice now, or be consigned to a life of mediocrity. I had friends that were Didion’s, and I envied them their free spiritedness—but I also thought their approach was dead wrong.
So at twenty-one, I chose the most prestigious job I could get. Brand consulting. New York City. In college I majored in english and business. The company that hired me had a verbal team which would allow me to marry my two majors. I would be able to flex my writing skills doing naming, copy-writing, and other verbal branding projects. I knew writing was my passion, but I thought this fig might be a sort of cheat, a way I could write and make money. But months later, when I found myself in a sound-proof Zoom cubicle making slides with potential names for a B2B dental conglomerate, I had to admit to myself, this fig was rotten.
After a year, I started applying to other jobs. At the two year mark, I packed up and moved again, this time to Washington, D.C. where I had gotten a job as an English teacher at a public high school. My friends and family were shocked. Why would I take a fifty-percent pay cut for a notoriously difficult and thankless job? But to me, this job moved me one step closer to my true passion: writing and books. I would spend all day surrounded by learning, discussing books, and helping students improve their writing skills. Wrong again.
For so many reasons, teaching high school was not for me. Another rotten fig. Two years into teaching, I recommitted to my writing. I wrote every day before school. I took online writing classes at night. I attended writing programs in the summer. Three years into teaching, I applied to MFA programs. And after my fourth year of teaching, I packed my bags again and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina to begin my MFA in Fiction Writing.
The graduate stipend was another fifty percent pay cut from what I’d been making as a high school teacher. I arrived at my program, twenty-eight years old, starting over for the third time, making a quarter of what I was making at twenty-three, feeling like I might never pick the right fig. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I get this right?
And then I taught my first undergraduate creative writing class, and something unbelievable happened. I didn’t hate my job. For the first time in my life, I could get out of bed on a work day and not want to die. And even better, part of my work day was writing itself. Finally, after years of false starts, I had chosen the right fig. And that fig was writing and teaching writing (at the college level).
This brings me to my advice. Nothing qualifies me to offer it, except the simple fact that learning it involved quite a lot of difficulty, discomfort, and risk, and following it has made each year of my twenties better than the one before it. This is the advice I left my undergraduate students with at the end of the semester.
The answer to how to approach your twenties lies between Plath and Didion. Everything you do is irrevocable, because time is finite, which means your choices matter. So you have to choose a fig. You cannot sit “in the crotch of this fig tree starving to death.” But choosing one fig does not cause all the others to instantly fall from the tree. If you realize you’ve chosen the wrong fig—and I mean as soon as you realize, because your twenties are shorter than you think—go back to the tree and pluck another. And another. And another. Until you’ve found the right one.
With each successive fig, you will learn more about what you want and don’t want, and you will get closer to the right fig. I am not saying pick a fig you know isn’t right, because it will be fun or easy and you can always pick more.2 I am saying finding the right fig might take a long time, so you need to start picking thoughtfully right away. You need to be honest with yourself about the choices you’ve made and whether they’re working for you. Each time you select a new fig, you need to ask yourself what you want from your life.
This advice should reassure you: you don’t have to pick right the first time. It should also light a fire under your ass: you cannot hang on to rotten fruit thinking it will ripen. You must pick and keep picking until you are sure the fig in your hand is the right one. When you’re sure, take a bite, let the juice run down your wrist, lick your fingers clean, sigh the contented sigh of someone who is warm and full after a satisfying meal.
I was so hard on myself every time I started over. In my head I called myself a quitter. I thought maybe I just wasn’t cut out of the professional world, just wasn’t good at being an employee. I compared myself to my friends who were steadily ascending in their careers. I felt like I was doing something wrong. But something in me refused to accept a life that wasn’t sweet, wasn’t fruitful, wasn’t brimming with flavor. And now, looking back, I realize that quitting, moving, starting over, again and again until I was happy is the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself. Some people will choose the right fig the first time, and that is great. But odds are, the first fig you pick won’t be the best one for you. That’s ok—as long as you do something about it.3
It took me almost my entire twenties to find the right fig. But, after everything, here I am, about to turn thirty, and I don’t feel scared or sad. I will not mourn the death of my twenties. I will continue to discard a fig once it has rotted. I will pluck fresh fruit that feeds me. I will make mistakes, and I will learn from them. I will make choices that count. I welcome the next year, and the next, and the next, because “the wonderful future” awaits. And it is already here. Happy 30th to me.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll just be speaking about my career, but I think this advice applies to relationships, cities, and more.
For more on this, read The Defining Decade by Dr. Meg Jay, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the importance of your twenties.
I also want to acknowledge that my ability to make these big changes in my life is a privilege. There are barriers that many people face that make major life changes—like moves or career shifts—nearly impossible. My advice is not intended to shame anyone unable to make the changes they want to make. It is meant to motivate and encourage those who may be staying in a situation they shouldn’t or who are beating themselves up for not (yet) having found fulfillment. I understand that each situation is unique. Even for me, it took years to make these changes in a way that was financially and professionally viable.
If you enjoyed this piece, please check out some of my other, recent essays:
I’m 22 rn and just vacillating between terror and flippancy as I come out of my graduate degree so thanks so much for this! I love the fact you were able to find something you love even though it was later than you think
your mind should be studied in a museum that's how good this post was.