I was 13 when I read Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.”
I can’t say it was one of my favorite books, but there was a page from Plath’s novel that stuck with me and touched me to my core — her fig tree metaphor.
Plath describes the heroine’s life branching out in front of her like a fig tree, where each fig is a potentially wonderful future. One fig is finding love and raising children, another is becoming a professor, and still another is traveling and so on. Plath’s character, however, cannot choose one path, and she is stuck in paralysis. Unable to decide, she watches as each fig goes rotten and every single dream slips away.
Reading this passage terrified me. I recognized the girl in the book — one so scared of making the wrong decision that she didn’t make one at all. It was me.
I grew up with a million passions. I had so much energy and lust for life — I wanted to do anything and everything.
I had a baking business where I would sell brownies to my middle school classmates, I learned Chinese at Sunday school, practiced seven different types of dance and had a blog and Instagram account where I wrote food reviews. I played competitive tennis, was an assistant lifeguard at a state beach and watched an abundance of rom-coms.
My teachers, peers and family members warned me that I was doing too much. They said that I was stretching myself thin, that there was no way I could be successful at everything I was doing.
I started to believe them. I quit dancing and closed my baking business. I made concessions and made school and tennis my main focus. My passion for life wavered, and I lost my color. I stopped having confidence in myself.
In September of my senior year of high school, I committed to playing Division I tennis at UC San Diego. But instead of feeling excited, I only felt relief.
Though I would be playing Division I tennis, I knew I would have to live at home and find two jobs to pay off school. All I would be doing would be studying, playing tennis and working.
I was so terrified of losing all of my figs that I grabbed the first one that came my way. I didn’t actually really even make a decision; the fig just fell into my lap.
Secretly, though, there was a flame of hope burning deep in my gut. I found out that my application fee waiver covered four University of California applications, and so I applied not just to UCSD, but also to UCLA.
When I got accepted into UCLA, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for a week. Without telling anyone, I accessed UCLA’s prospective student scholarship portal and applied for every scholarship they offered, including the Junamici Scholarship, which is awarded each year to one in-state student who shows immense interest and dedication to a foreign language.
A few weeks later, I got the email saying that I did not receive the scholarship. I was crushed. But I knew I couldn’t give up on my dream just yet; I could apply for more scholarships and bolster it with the financial aid I was given. I could still go to UCLA.
Then in May, I got the call. The student who had received the Junamici Scholarship chose a different school. I was going to UCLA on a full-ride scholarship, and my years of Russian, Spanish and Mandarin had finally paid off.
At UCLA, I am pursuing everything I want.
I just won a national championship in Texas with my club tennis team, where I went undefeated in all six singles matches. I am an assistant news editor at the Daily Bruin, where I contribute to incredible coverage of this higher institution. I am an intern at EdSource. In my free time, I swim in the ocean, hike, do hot yoga, go on runs, read books and try every new restaurant and sweet treat spot Los Angeles has to offer. I play on intramural soccer, volleyball and flag football teams — sports I had never tried before. I even opened my heart and met the love of my life (we bonded over burritos) and have never been so happy.
My love for a million different things is what got me here today. I am at UCLA because I didn’t stop at one language — I learned four. I am at UCLA today because I decided that I would not fit my dreams into the perfect box that society created for me, but instead would let them grow in any way they wanted.
For all the dreamers out there, do not let anyone make you pick one fig.
You can have the whole tree, I promise.
Natalia Mochernak is a second-year student at UCLA majoring in communication and Spanish, and a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps.
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