I Am Not the Fig Tree. I Am the Whole Fucking Orchard, the Rotting Fruit, the Soil, and the Wasps.

Life Isn’t a Single Fig.

My dad did not die instantly in a car crash… but he should have. That’s how bad it was. He was 30 years old, tearing down a road in his car, driving like a man who thought physics did not apply to him, and he crashed directly into an oak tree. Not just a "bump the car, call the RAC" crash. No. My dad projectile-launched himself through the windscreen, twisted through the air like some horror movie stunt double, and slammed back into the passenger seat (the oak tree probably just stood there like, “This idiot really tried to fight me.”)

His pelvis? Snapped like a breadstick. His left leg? Turned into a jigsaw puzzle that no one could put back together. And because this was 2003, when safety was for nerds, he had no seatbelt on, despite being told approximately 500 times by family members to stop driving like a cowboy on ketamine. That crash ruined his life. He was in and out of Liverpool hospital for years, getting bolted back together in surgeries longer than a Lord of the Rings marathon, and eventually, he just never got better.

But he didn’t die. Not then. Instead, he spent ten years deteriorating, fighting his own body like it was an enemy army, until he finally just lost the war. He was 39 when he died, and I was 14. And the same day he died, I sat on my bed, staring at my hands, and thought: "Oh. I can go at any point."

Not in a poetic, tragic heroine way. Not in a "Wow, life is precious" way. Just in a cold, brutal, stomach-dropping realisation that death is never when you expect it to be. Life does not wait for you to be ready, settled, or financially secure enough to handle it. It will just end one day, with or without your permission. (Bit rude, actually.) And I decided, then and there, I would never live with regret.

Except then I turned 23, and my own body decided to pack it in. One day, I was walking fine, living life, unbothered. The next, my legs stopped working properly, my nervous system started glitching like a Sims character mid-breakdown, and I was suddenly flung into a full-blown health crisis. It took months of tests, waiting, and existential panic before I was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease, which basically means my body is in permanent protest mode. (If my body was a union, I’d be at a tribunal fighting for unfair treatment by now.)

And suddenly, life didn’t feel short anymore. It felt caged. Would I still be able to do everything I wanted? Would I have to cut my dreams down to "realistic" and "practical"? Would I be forced to settle for a life that felt like a sad little raisin of its former self?

Then I remembered: I have never, in my entire existence, been capable of being just one thing.

This is why the fig tree discourse is actively ruining my life.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Sylvia Plath once described life as a fig tree full of choices—career, love, adventure, all ripening before her, and she couldn’t choose, so they all rotted. And because TikTok and Substack have the emotional range of a Victorian child in a fever dream, people have taken this and turned it into a motivational crisis wrapped in pastel aesthetic.

"Pick a fig before it’s too late!"
"Don’t let fear stop you from choosing!"
"Just go for it!"

Shut the fuck up.

I never thought I had to pick one thing and let it define me forever. Because I am not just the tree. I am the entire fucking orchard.

And yet, society loves to convince us that we must choose. Pick one career. Stick to it. Pick one dream. Be grateful for it. Pick one identity. Live inside it obediently until you die. (Would literally rather be crushed under the weight of my own ambitions than be reduced to a LinkedIn bio.)

But here’s the real tragedy of this entire conversation: we were brainwashed into believing we are small.

That we have to fear failure.
That we must worry about wasted time.
That we should agonise over choices as if they are irreversible.

And we sit there, paralysed, letting all of our opportunities rot, not because we don’t want them, but because we’re scared of making the wrong choice. (But sure, let’s make another fucking vision board instead of actually doing something tangible. That’ll fix it.)

But do you know what fig trees actually do?

They grow more figs.

They do not cry when one falls.
They do not panic when one is rotten.
They do not question their entire existence over one bad fig.

They just keep fucking growing.

And so do we.

I have eaten so many bad figs in my life.

Some were delicious but fleeting.
Some were so disgustingly rotten I should’ve spat them out immediately.
Some were unripe, and I forced myself to keep eating because I thought I had to.

But at no point did I run out.

And that’s what people don’t get. You don’t just get one shot. Life is not a single fork in the road, where one wrong turn condemns you forever. It is a fucking labyrinth, full of U-turns, new doors, and routes you never even saw coming.

Which is why I will never stop growing, changing, trying, failing, and starting over. I will burn it all down and rebuild it if I have to. I will never sit back and let life pass me by because I was too scared of choosing the “wrong” thing.

And yeah, maybe this is just another existential millennial using the fig tree metaphor for a Substack post. Maybe I am as guilty as everyone else.

But at least I’m doing something.

Because at the end of the day, I’d rather be a wildly unpredictable, overgrown, wasp-infested orchard than a perfectly still corpse. (And yes, I am still emotionally recovering from learning that figs contain dead wasps inside them. Cheers for that, nature.)