As you read the following quote, the origin of which we will not disclose until the bottom of the page, think not of Taylor Swift, multi-platinum and Grammy-award-winning artist, and think not of Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical protagonist from her only novel The Bell Jar. Nay. Read and absorb the meaning. Stave off all images of young women with long faces, lying languidly in dusty rose-colored chez lounges, their arms draped melodramatically over their eyes as small, feeble sighs escape their perfectly flushed lips and simply read.
"My fears circle around me making the wrong choices and messing this up for myself. I don’t wanna end up being awful and intolerable. Alone. Laying in a marble bathtub by myself, like sad, with a glass of wine just complaining that my life ended up alone because I pushed everyone away because I thought I was too good to hang out with anybody."
Now. Breathe. Let your mind circle like the woman in question's ever-present fears. Who said this? Was it Esther, the depressed young woman who fears she'll be crushed by the never-ending expectations life and her peers have thrust upon her? Or is it Taylor, the young country star whose fame as rocketed her into the belly of the beast where no cruel comment or harsh criticism is spared by anyone with an opinion about her life or her life's work?
Drumroll please... It's Taylor, who gave an interview to InStyle UK, according to The Daily Mail, in which she discusses the pressure of hey day to day existence — which, if you're Swift, can't be easy these days in light of the fact that the Internet has thrown her into the Hatable Celebrity Bucket where her best company is Anne Hathaway.
But can you fault us for feeling a little displaced after reading it? Let's be honest, Swift has probably been brushing up on Plath's works. How could this quote not be inspired by the woman who wrote this:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. 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, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 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."
I rest my case.
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