It was around this time that I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Even though it was fiction, Plath described the central character’s gradual descent into shattering mental illness in a way that could only have come from her own struggles. I identified with it. I identified with her. “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
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