I am currently trying to reinvent myself after an eventful season of losing my constants — I left my job, burned a bridge, went out of my bubbles. A step that I wouldn’t know I’d be brave enough to take. I am still trying to navigate through these times, to slow down and figure out my next move.
Some quiet days still makes me feel like I’m having a paralysis over the overwhelming choices that apparently my life has to offer. Back when I still have everything in the grasp of my hand, I thought my choices are limited. Bounded by the space and time that I had at the moment, I couldn’t do a lot of things, yet I starve to be a lot of things. I ran out of time, I ran out of space to hold things within myself.
Those quiet days also came with a lot of thoughts of things I could do and things I could be. This specific line from The Bell Jar crossed my mind as it was a trend back then in TikTok. I didn’t think too much of this line, until I realized I, myself, is currently sitting in the crotch of my own fig tree.
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.
The fact that quote was a trend proved that most people can relate to the feeling of indecisiveness towards their own future. I know I am not the only one who felt that way, but for my case, I always feel like I am living different lives each day — or even in just one day.
I feel like I have different personas for each thing that I want to do. I have lots of interests and passions, it is a blessing until it wasn’t. Now that I lost all of the constants in my life and trying to get myself on track again, I feel stuck in indecision. I know I am still young, but that’s the worst part. Stepping into adulthood is scary, the potentials are endless yet the future can feel as crippling as it is liberating.
I want to do everything, but doing one thing might risk me another branch of my fig tree. Sometimes I know what I want, but I don’t know how to grasp it, it feels like out of my reach. Sometimes I don’t know what I want, fearing I’d choose the wrong ‘fig’.
My fig tree is made up of being a project manager, architect, yogi, baker, writer, movie director, also a mom who loves her child dearly and is loved by her husband. Sometimes it’s also comprised of living alone in a cottage by the shore, with a large kitchen and three cats, and watch the sunset from the bench on the porch.
With plenty of time that I have now, one of the biggest and scariest thing to think is my career. My dream has always been to work in architecture field. While the irony is that I have a love-hate relationship with the field, I’ve always had the itch to excel in a career in architecture. The last role that I did taught me a lot of things, but wasn’t exactly what I’m looking for. I was afraid I took an almost rotten fig, so I stepped back from it.
Also looking back, I juggled a lot of things at a time. I worked in a large-scale project that I dreamed of, yet I lived another life of having a bakery business while maintaining a healthy lifestyle by doing yoga and gym. “How did you manage to do all of those things?” — I get this a lot, and honestly to this day I don’t even know the answer. I’d say I have different personas every time I switched up my activity, and that somehow kept me going. Or perhaps, the branches of my tree was somehow strong enough to hold all of the figs until it wasn’t.
Maybe that’s the metaphor, the branches of my tree can’t hold it anymore now that the figs kept growing and growing, as my life choices unveiled day by day. The branches and the figs wrinkled, and one by one, they plopped to the ground on my feet. Call it quarter life crisis or just a mid-20s confusion, but I couldn’t hold everything anymore, and fell down to the endless hole of indecisiveness.
I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.
With the time I have now to contemplate my life, I slowly began to be aware that I was craving something by wanting to be everything all at once. Wanting everything means I’d lost everything as well. The craving that I felt perhaps was just my need to be everything I am not.
Now I am trying to slow things down, to tend every figs that grows to replace the old ones. To be mindful of the branches that I step on, to fulfill my craving by getting to know someone that I really am.
I cannot be everything I wanted, but I am aware that my dreams can change, evolve, and even grow into another dreams, and myself too can be a lot of shapes and forms every day.
I am allowing myself to the time and space I haven’t had for a while, to reinvent myself again. I hope you’d do the same.
