There is no wrong fig
Life is not a harvest we can inspect at the end and decide whether we picked the right figs. Some things will make sense only in hindsight. That does not necessarily make them wrong. It simply means the tree kept growing.
There is a moment in Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” when Esther Greenwood stands beneath a fig tree, imagining each fig as a different life she could have: becoming a poet, a professor, traveling the world, having a family, finding love, and all the other versions of herself she can imagine.
The problem? She wants all of them.
Unable to choose, she watches the figs ripen and eventually shrivel and fall. The fig tree has since become a familiar metaphor for the anxiety of having too many possibilities and the fear of choosing the wrong one—the belief that somewhere among all the lives available to us is one perfect life we are supposed to find.
But what if the tragedy is not that Esther cannot have every fig? What if it’s that she has been made to believe there is a right one?
Choosing the “right” life
We are taught to think this way from an early age: choose the right course, find the right career, meet the right person, and move to the right place. There is nothing wrong with thinking about where our decisions might lead. But when every choice starts to feel like a permanent fork in the road, it becomes easy to believe that there is one path we are supposed to get right.
The trouble is, we will never know what the other paths would have looked like. We can imagine the career we did not pursue or the city we never moved to, but we only ever see them from a distance. In our minds, they can remain exactly as we want them to be. We do not have to deal with the difficult parts, the compromises, or the possibility that they might not have worked out either.
The life we chose does not come with that luxury. We have to experience it as it unfolds, including the parts we did not plan for and the moments when we change our minds. And because we are living it rather than imagining it, it can be easy to mistake its uncertainty for evidence that we chose wrong.
But life is not supposed to feel like proof that we made the right decision.
We are the tree
We often imagine ourselves as Esther sitting beneath the tree—forced to choose among the figs. But what if we are the tree?
The figs are possibilities that grow, change, ripen, and sometimes fall away. Who we are at 18 is not necessarily who we are at 25, and what we want at 25 may not be what we want at 35.
A person can want a career and a family. They can want stability and adventure. They can spend years pursuing one dream and later discover another. They can choose something with conviction and eventually change their mind. They can leave one version of their life behind without having to call it a mistake.
Life is not a harvest we can inspect at the end and decide whether we picked the right figs. Some things will make sense only in hindsight. Some choices will lead somewhere unexpected. Others may not work out at all. That does not necessarily make them wrong. It simply means the tree kept growing.
Maybe that is what Esther could not yet see: The figs were never the whole story. Neither is the choice.
The most important fig
And if we can relax for just a moment, perhaps we will realize that the most important fig is the one we are in right now. Not the one we could have chosen, not the one we might choose someday, and not the one hanging just beyond our reach, but the one we are actually living.
We are allowed to grow differently from what we once imagined. We are allowed to reach for one fig and later reach for another. We are allowed to leave some untouched. We do not have to know what every fig would have tasted like to appreciate the one in our hands.
There is no wrong fig. There is only the life we are growing into.
