For Whom the Bell Jar Tolls

Most recently I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

A classic, for sure. I hated it.

I felt myself upset with it, and practically trudging through toward the end. But as time has passed, and I’ve stepped away from Esther, I found myself understanding why I hated it.

I understood Esther.

Hot take, I know. Not many can say that.

My awkwardness, my depression, the feeling of wanting to belong and knowing what I was supposed to do but not being able.

The idea of disappointing everyone around me.

For I was a promising young woman. Then why couldn’t I just get it right? Why couldn’t I just stick to the damn plan and just do it? Be the person I was supposed to be?

I was Esther, and life was the fig tree. So many options that I could have chosen, and instead I stood there, my feet glued to the ground (an actual phrase a manager once used to describe me), unable to pick a damn fig.

Even now there they stay, before my eyes, still, rotting away, the options dying before me.

And still I’m here.

Feet glued. To the damn. Ground.

Beyond this aching nothingness and misdirection (more so, non-direction), there are other characteristics I share with Esther. For one, we were both admitted to a mental hospital for fear of our well-being.

Now mine is a rather long story tangled in family tension when I was young, angry, and spoke out of spite. But I’ll never forget being in that room. In that place. Being monitored. Having to socialize so that they’d see I was okay.

When Esther meets Doctor Gordon, now that’s what I relate to. That’s what I get angry about. The public hospital. The inhumanity. The lack of communication. The detachment. The dismissal.

After 17 hours of sleeping and refusing to eat, I had made 2 friends.

Oh, the time we had.

We played Candyland about 15 times in a row before it was unbearable. They got to listen to the in-house psychiatrist tell me it was to be expected that my “mother” would love me less since I was her adopted daughter, not her biological one, and that I probably should figure my life out and move out.

I cried, of course.

Right there in the shitty “dining room” where everyone was listening, pretending not to notice.

I remember I was on my period too. I hadn’t showered, and I knew I smelled. I asked to shower, but they’d told me to wait. So, I did.

Then another day passed.

I smelled like a carcass, and I knew it. And my new friend knew too, because he asked one of the nurses if they’d please let me shower.

I’d always been sad. A little disconnected, maybe empty sometimes, but never like how I felt when I left that place. I felt like I’d never experience joy again. I’d never smile. I’d never feel.

I was treated like I was crazy, like I was inhuman, like I was broken.

Esther experiences this too.

Feeling almost too much and nothing.

After realizing her life and choices are slipping away, she still can’t seem to get a grasp on it.

At the beginning of the book, she is set up for success.

She is supposed to be a promising young woman.

But she can’t decide.

And in the indecision, she falls deeper and deeper into the paralyzing fear of indecision.

So yeah, when I read The Bell Jar, it felt a little too close to home.

I hated Esther because I was her.

I am her.

Especially now.

So much time has passed.

Even more opportunity lost.

And I’m free.

I’m numb, and I’m not, and I’m free, but free to do what?

As we end the novel, Esther appears to be making her way out, becoming free again too…

And still, what will we choose?