What Color Is Your Column?

I can’t decide what to write about.

That’s hardly a good start to a column, but putting seven words on paper bemoaning my inability to put words on paper beats putting no words at all.

I have a few ideas, of course. The ones that don’t taste stale, though, taste a little fishy—as if I could start down the path of writing one and, five stunted paragraphs later, realize that my argument is the product of many exams and few hours of sleep, and that I could have picked a different topic and written an at least slightly coherent piece, but it would be too late. And then where will I be?

My inability to commit brings to mind a quote from a fittingly cheery source for midterm season: Sylvia Plath. “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree,” writes Plath, “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.”

I’m slightly concerned to find myself empathizing with a woman who stuck her head in an oven. And yet the crippling uncertainty Plath expresses has been haunting me of late—not only when it comes to something as trivial as picking a column topic. For one, my sources tell me I cannot enroll only in Gen Ed courses for the remainder of my college career. They tell me it’s time to concentrate.

Settling on a concentration scares me for reasons closely aligned with Plath’s. If I opt to study English, will I forsake the chance to truly understand the ideals underpinning our democracy? And if I go the route of government, will I ever manage to get through Ulysses? Sure, I can still take classes in one department even if the name of another will grace my diploma, but devoting myself to one discipline will inevitably decrease the amount I learn about any other.

That all seems like small potatoes, though, when I look three years ahead toward the looming, unknown future that awaits me in the Real World. Will I doom myself to a life of Top Ramen and breadcrumbs as I struggle to support myself by writing personal essays (much like these) that no one has any interest in reading, much less publishing, until I ultimately surrender and go to law school to secure my future? The fact that I’m having trouble breaking or tightening up the preceding sentence doesn’t bode well. If I’m fated to fail in literary endeavors, I might as well start studying for the LSAT now.

Thumbing through a bookshelf back home this summer, I once happened upon an old edition of a publication that did little to set me at ease: “What Color Is Your Parachute?: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career Changers.” I don’t even know where to find my parachute, much less its color. Send me skydiving and I’ll flail wildly in the air until I hit the ground. I can’t decide what to do with a column, and I can’t decide what to do with college. How on earth will I ever decide what to do with my life?

More than slightly concerned now, I’ve resolved to take a tip from Sylvia Plath. Her parable, not so shockingly, does not have a happy ending. “[A]s I sat there, unable to decide,” Plath describes, “the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” I hear Plath’s message loud and clear: I should buck up and pick a gosh darn fig already.

Sitting around worrying about what to study won’t get me anywhere—studying something will. Rather than agonizing over our choices, we should go ahead and make them. We should listen to our guts, perhaps with a light helping of logic on the side, and take things as they come. That’s not to say we’ll never choose wrong, but rather to suggest that we have people around to help us when we do. Safety nets, whether our friends or family or Harvard itself, stand ready to catch us when our multicolored parachutes malfunction. Plus, there’s the huge chance that we choose right and that we’re happy for it.

After all, I did just write a column.

Molly L. Roberts ’16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Cabot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow her on Twitter at @mollylroberts.