The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

Same

My words bungled out thick as molasses.

Oh wait a minute, people know about molasses? Egyptians secret is out!!!

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

Not only nervous but also privileged which is way worse

It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn’t pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

I think anyone who has/had depression thought about this at least once in their life

I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.

I didn’t want to go at first, because I thought Jody would notice the change in me, and that anybody with half an eye would see I didn’t have a brain in my head.

A perfect way to describe why many with depression avoid seeing close ones. “The change in me” I liked this line. Even if the person looks the same or normal to everyone, anyone with depression does not see it that way. Some, including myself, feel like depression is printed and shown in our face, body language, and facial expressions; to people, I look perfectly fine, and I look like me — to myself, I look like am I a completely different person.

I hate saying anything to a group of people. When I talk to a group of people I always have to single out one and talk to him, and all the while I am talking I feel the others are peering at me and taking unfair advantage. I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say “Fine.”

I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace.

Sometimes this is very true, but other times it is just another lie by our brains

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.

“What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan. “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.”

This, this fear, the fear of pregnancy, should be discussed more often.

“Would you act differently if you didn’t have to worry about a baby?” “Yes,” I said,

Interesting... very interesting, so, at first she was trying to stay a “lady”, whatever that means, and then this was the reason that stopped her. Maybe that’s what stopped her from the beginning? I need answers!

I smelt a mingling of Pablum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?

“Motherhood” is an instinct in every woman right? *cough* bullshit

And he drained his tea like a tonic medicine.

it must be those last sips lol

But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

Using “the bell jar” as a metaphor for depression is brilliant, brilliant!

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Here it is... the famous line!

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road,