Thirty-One

Sylvia Plath is not death. Nor is she suicide. She, a living person, a breathing person, a loving, writing, creating person, died. We all do it. And not everything else we ever do is directly related to our impending death, however that may death may come. Even if it comes through suicide.

And along the same vein, my recent obsession with her work, her writing, her life does not make me suicidal. I admire her writing ability, her ability to get published. I am envious of her. Of her writing.

I am like Sylvia in a thousand tiny ways. Her father died of complications on diabetes, as did my mother. She was an outsider, probably mostly needlessly. She was lonely when surrounded by people, even people who loved her. She was a commendable student. She wrote. She made her As like miniature twos.

She also moved to London, was published in Seventeen magazine by the time she was eighteen, married a handsome, creative man, bore two children, and died, of her own volition, at the age of thirty.

I am nearly thirty-one.

I have not been published--not for real. I've never had the courage to live alone in a strange place. I've not married any man, handsome or otherwise, have not born children, and most likely will never have the opportunity to do either. And I am nearly thirty-one.

All the pain that Sylvia lived, I, too, have lived. I have seen the death of a parent too soon. I have been rejected by men, by magazines, by the world at large. I have cried and cried and cried until my body dried, my throat bled, I closed my eyes and slept a restless sleep. But I've never known her highs.

Maybe that's why I'm still alive. Maybe my failure to succeed has saved me. I haven't lived that juxtaposition of utter failure and total bliss, not the way she did. Valleys are deeper when you approach them from mountains. Maybe it's just that I never had a doctor prescribe me any antidepressants that delivered me into suicidal tendencies. Or perhaps I am intrinsically stronger than she.

The only thing that really worries me is that Sylvia idolized Virginia Woolf, another suicidee, the way that I am coming to idolize Sylvia. And it bothers me that even such a grandiose personality as Sylvia Plath spoke mostly of everyday things when she was sinking into depressions, like failed dates and the inability to make simple decisions. It bothers me that her suicide directly followed a separation from her husband, illness in herself and her children, heat and electricity that did not work right in her apartment, a long cold winter. It seems like someone who has turned into such a suicidal legacy should have died for a nobler cause than the things that frustrate women all across the world every day. It scares me, because I can't soothe myself in the notion that she had a greater reason to die than I might.

But I am almost thirty-one.

I Have Been Reading Sylvia Plath

The journals of. And the poetry of. So far. Soon to include the essays and short stories of, and The Bell Jar of. And what this has done for me, especially the journals, is reinvigorate my inclination to journal.

So once again, I will embark on a journey of journaling, and maybe I will actually succeed this time!