The Fig Tree, and The Pure Existential Panic You Face In Your 20's
Do you want to move to Australia, or are you just 27 years old?
I’m going to kick things off much like any of the worst speeches at weddings and funerals - with a quotation. (Stay with me, please.)
In Sylvia’s Plath, The Bell Jar, she wrote this:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree…From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor…I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
The chances are, if you’re in your mid-20’s-to-early 30’s, you’ll really be able to pick up what Sylvia Plath was putting down when you read that. And for good reason. Being in your 20’s is like standing in front of a quiz host as they ask you to choose between 500 doors, each one with fairly compelling prizes waiting to be claimed. You are constantly bamboozled with options, and the nauseatingly disorientating part of this is how drastically different those options are - and yet somehow, she says grimacing, you will want them all.
On Monday you’re ready to settle down, have kids, and really crack that Sourdough recipe - and then on Wednesday, you’re looking at flights to Australia and about to yeet not only your career, but your loving long-term boyfriend of four years. And that’s on a good week.
It can all feel like an impossible sudoku. You find yourself scratching your head wondering how you can simultaneously progress in your job, whilst also quitting your job to go explore South America. You want to save money for the house deposit but you also want to drink life dry, and go on holidays with your mates. You want to have kids but obviously not yet because you’re still a baby yourself, and yet - and fucking yet - you’re nearly 30. The list goes on and on, until you look in the mirror, see your first wrinkles and first grey hairs and receding hair line and fall to your knees in anguish, feeling like a boring cog in the machine.
It’s not just me saying this either, all you have to do is scroll through Instagram and you’ll find a few jokes on the matter. In fact, even the psychologists will back me up. Life coach and psychologist, Karin Peeters, describes the mid 20’s panic much like ol’ Plath, explaining it as being paralysed by prolonged decision-making stress, and a man named Dr. Oliver Robinson even began a career as an academic by studying the ‘mid 20’s crisis as a phenomenon.’
So, why is this?
The obvious point - as is made by many the TikTok comedian - is that to be in your 20’s/30’s is to see different people, all roughly the same age, living wildly different lifestyles. When you’re a teenager, the people you know tend to be doing what you’re doing i.e going to school. Yet, suddenly, in your 20’s you enter a dizzying age where you ping-pong between one social group who are all married, having babies and deciding on which kitchen counter-tops to get, to your other group of friends who just quit their jobs to travel the world, and somehow go to every day festival in London.
It can be so easy to feel like you’re getting life wrong. Like sand is seeping away during this thing we call ‘youth’ and if you don’t act NOW, it will forever be too late. That if you don’t focus on your job, you’ll forever be in your overdraft and professionally unfulfilled. Or if that you don’t have fun now, it will never be as within reach again. That, whatever you are doing, you are irrevocably laying down tracks which will come to define your future; all of which is exacerbated by people - semi-regularly - telling you that this is the time of your life, and it all goes down hill from here. (Brilliant.)
The issue is - as much as we may collectively joke about it - this exact mentality can be a corrosive force when your own mental health is shaken, as I learnt two years ago.
For me, everything came to a head in the summer of 2022 when I turned 25 and my Mum went to rehab.
I had spent a huge chunk of my childhood watching my Mum battle addiction so when she went to rehab, it felt like the fairytale ending I had always dreamed of… Except it wasn’t, and she relapsed. And when she relapsed, I let my feet fall away from the earth.
In the face of the pain I was going through (and lots of other things, I have to add) I decided the time had come for me to switch up my life, and - get this - “find myself.”
I chose to channel all of my energy into the mission of living the mid 20’s dream as my most ‘authentic’ self. I wanted to scrape away any trauma, any people-pleasing, any fear, and go where my heart took me. I decided that my past had been far too taken up with the concerns of others, and therefore the challenge must now be to brutally examine every inch of my life as it was, and, moving forward, to do everything I wanted to do.
Easy, right?
As it turned out however, the outcome of this retrospectively blinkered plan was to launch headfirst into perpetual uncertainty, and a feverish mid-20’s breakdown.
Suddenly, I found myself in a constant state of questioning. Questioning my career, my relationship, the person I wanted to be in this world. I evaluated all of my decisions and every aspect of my life - what does this say about the person I am? What life am I walking towards? What options am I forever shutting off by doing this? What does the ‘authentic’ Jess want?
Does she want to go travelling and to see the world? Does she want to leave Bristol and move to London with her best friend? Does she want to tend a garden and start making homemade pesto? Or does she want to be licking a shot from a strangers belly button in Ibiza? Does she want to be a high-flying corporate GirlBoss or does she want to live in the forest and banish money as an evil social construct? Does she want safety? Or excitement? I saw the world in a set of binaries. One or another.
Alongside this, like an insane metronome, the “make every moment count” message was present for so many of my decisions. I felt it everywhere. Squeeze every last drop! Dare to dream! Say yes to EVERYTHING!
The result was that everywhere that I looked I saw options. Fig, after fig, after fig, after fig.
And you know what the consequence was?
In this mid-20’s quest to burrow myself within the richness of life and to ‘find’ myself, I hurt people, I lost a rare and beautiful friendship, and I forgot myself more completely than I ever really imagined possible.
As I look back at this now - at the withering, wrinkly age of 27 - I find that I have new conclusions.
Firstly, there is no secret ‘authentic’ identity, waiting to be found underneath your psyche like a buried chest of treasure. And, secondly, in regards to that existential angst we all find ourselves submerged in from time to time, wanting it ‘all’ isn’t conviction, drive, fun, or ambition. It is fear.
I didn’t want it all. I was just scared of choosing the wrong thing. Scared that with every decision I was making I was closing off options to myself. Scared that I was running out of time and building a beige, unfulfilling life in the critical era of my 20’s.
We don’t live in a vacuum. Pervasive messaging - like the overload of options you face in your 20’s - intermingles with your life, and life doesn’t always go as you plan. When you’re feeling healthy and grounded, it can be easy to be rational but when your foundation is rocked, this messaging can be an unravelling force, because at the core of it all isn’t a desire to live an adventurous, gorgeous life but a paranoia that your life, as it is, isn’t enough.
We have to move away from the chaos of wanting everything at once, and instead move towards learning to be grateful, and appreciative, for the life we have - which is far more of adventure than we probably ever stop to see.
I am not saying settle. I am not saying work a job you hate, ignore your dreams and then die. (Who wants that on a tote bag?). You should definitely do all of the fun things, and strive to live a beautiful, varied life. What I am saying is that you don’t need to punish yourself if your life is pretty average for periods of time.
I want spontaneity as much as I want security. I want to travel, go on crazy nights out, and dance bare-foot at 5am - and I also want to put down my roots, focus on my health and work hard so that I can actually have savings. I want to see incredible places, and I very much - and always will - chase all of the wonder in the world and all of the things I used to lie awake dreaming about as a child. It’s okay to want it all, but it’s also nice, and soothing, to be happy with what you have. In other words, to not sit there, paralysed, starving underneath the fig tree.
You simply can’t travel the world/ace your career/say yes to everything/buy a house/be single/get married/go on an adventure every single day etc etc etc all at once, all the time. Because oh my god, is that even possible? Does any person - excluding hyper-attractive travel influencers - have the money, time, or mental capacity?
Plus, since when did we decide that living a nice life is boring? Have we really all got it that good, that we forget that safety and security are what people die for?
So, if you’re like me, and need the pep talk occasionally, here goes.
Stop telling yourself time is running out. Any age is young if you’ve got the perspective to match, and you can start again at any point. Stop judging yourself for not having it all. Lots of people never go travelling. Lots of people don’t have a job that fulfils their soul and provides them with their life purpose. Lots of people don’t have partners. Lots of people don’t have a friendship group to rival the tight-knit intimacy of Monica, Chandler et al. And those people are happy. Because they have a million other things. Focus on the incredible things you do have, and know that, if you’re lucky, life is long. You have more time than you think.
Remember, being unsatisfied is a privilege. If you’ve got safety, food and shelter, everything else is a bonus. You’re living what so many people out there would give everything for. It is an unbelievably blessed thing to have the beauty of good options.
And finally, think about it this way. The times that you feel bored will make times of inspiration so much juicier. The days where you feel unsatisfied will give way to weeks of contentment. And in days of confusion, a plump, gorgeous fig will drop on your lap. (We’re done with the metaphor now, I promise).
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Written by Jess Blackwell
I’m Jess, the founder of The Everyday Magazine. I work as a Studio Manager for a Boudoir Photography studio and, as a general rule, I like to write about things that would be awkward to discuss with the family.