The Bell Jar 🔔

Last week, a heaviness lay itself upon me. And I couldn’t shake it.

I came across a post by writer Glennon Doyle, about feeling sad, or happy on any given day and to just let it be. Sigh.

Okay, I said to myself. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I began reading, off a summer reading list, Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar. 📖

That darned universe, always listening. 🌍

Knowing little about Plath, a pioneer in writing about mental health, I discovered her tragic fate. ✍🏽

“Depression and mental illness were subjects much on people’s minds...The Bell Jar sailed right onto the bestseller list and...quickly established itself as a female rite-of-passage novel…” 📚

How did I miss it? 😳

“To Molly O’Neill, a 17 year-old lifeguard in Ohio…[it] was nothing short of astonishing. Above all she was amazed by the possibility of madness descending like a tornado into a typical bright young woman’s life out of nowhere -- That could happen? I could hardly believe it.” 👀

Today, we talk more openly, thanks to writers like Plath. Seemingly out of nowhere, a depression takes such swift hold of her protagonist:

“I hadn’t washed my hair for three weeks…hadn’t slept for seven nights...it seemed so silly...I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue...It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it…wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

Many of us find our way out of darkness. Meet a friend for a walk. Talk on the phone. Watch the NHL Playoffs. Cut bangs. We go from happy, to sad, and back again — a thing of beauty, that fluid transition. 🔁 If lucky, we find our way back to the light.

But some, like Plath, need a lot more. 😞

This novel came to me in a most timely manner. 🙏🏽

“But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”

― Sylvia Plath