So... I am reading this because once upon a time dreamsaremadeof told me that when she reads my blog she remembers her favourite poet Sylvia Plath. I always liked those kind of compliments, you know. When someone tells you, you writing reminds them of their favourite author because it means your writing echoes something that they have responded to. This is how I discovered Lana del Rey as well. Someone told me that del Rey was her go to ambient music when she is reading my stories.

But anywho, I am not big on poetry as I have a short attention span and my mind is just all bells and whistles and a lot of whizzing through thoughts, so yeah poetry just isn't the best medium for me. Though I do like "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" and "Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came" and Paradise Lost, but with my deteriorating focus, I have been quite averse to them lately. But since dreamsaremadeof mentioned Sylvia Plath, I kind of wanted to dip into her mind stream and encountered this quotation:

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

which as someone who has been suffering from being bipolar just, you know, I don't even know the how to say it, not respond to, something definitely deeper, maybe somehow understand. It's sad, of course, that Plath felt that she had a choice, back in the day, where mental illness is so obscure, you know. Which is why, I think, she ended up killing herself.

But that mental unhealth kinhood aside, I decided to pick up The Bell Jar because a) it's a novel, b) it's about insanity. I came into reading this book with a lot of expectations, because this is well celebrated and she is one of the very few literary female figureheads for even today. I should say I am only at page 28 and it's almost too beautiful and painful to read, because... it's like reading something I know, like a forgotten journal or something. Of course I have never lived large in New York, but her short sentiments like the love of scalding baths and memorizing the water stained ceilings and the world looking like a life-like poster that was dead to you... I just... it's my head split open and the contents spilled like unfurling ribbons. Oh god. I think she writes so beautifully, but also messily, and yes, breath-taking... and one moment where she was eating as much caviar as she can keep her friends away from I was laughing and then I cried at the hopelessness of success.

I am actually scared to continue, since Esther Greenwood would go mad and perhaps never return, and her train of thought is just in the same direction as where mine is headed. I wonder though, sometimes, if it would be better to be locked up and stop living, you know, because sometimes every breath feels like a struggle and I think The Bell Jar is a pretty dangerous book that I am compelled to read. Oh well.