i know they’re her private journals, and shouldn’t necessarily be used as a rule book of any sort to live by; but being 19 myself, i thought i could gain knowledge from a girl who i assumed would most definitely have more common sense than i do.
i’m almost 200 pages in and am actually growing quickly tired of trying to track the different dates and men and boys. maybe the absence of her father plays a big part in this, but whatever enchantment sylvia has worked up in me is quickly made dull by the beginning of her next entry, which is a complete 180 from the last, in the span of a day (i love him, never mind i hate him, and there’s this other guy).
one day she’s accepted in mademoiselle, eating caviar, drinking champagne staying out late and the next (for no apparent reason) she’s dejected, hopeless. and she says it herself, she has everything and more. and i’m unfortunately not seeing it as “no matter how much you have you’re still empty”, rather than as “this girl has absolutely zero foresight”.
these journals have served only to paint sylvia as an extremely ungrateful person, and unfortunately i’ve gained no insight or found any knowledge to superimpose onto my own life (other than observe how childish and unappreciative one of your favorite authors realistically is)
I think you might have gone into this with a misunderstanding of who Sylvia Plath was.
You’re reading the journals of a woman with depression who eventually committed suicide. She isn’t ungrateful and lacking in foresight - she’s lacking in serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine because depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
What you’ve discovered is that depression sucks. That you can have caviar and champagne and all kinds of fun and you still feel horrific.
i HAVE depression.
Do you think, like Plath, your depression is why you are very much lacking in empathy for others?
and you are a different person from Sylvia Plath. maybe use this as an exercise in figuring out why you think people only deserve sympathy for their struggles if you deem them worthy or relatable. part of growing from your teenage years into an adult is learning how to actively empathize with others instead of applying your limited perspective to all situations. this is an instance of that. I’m sure if someone read your private thoughts half a century from now they, too, would find things to mock.
these journals have served only to paint sylvia as an extremely ungrateful person, and unfortunately i’ve gained no insight or found any knowledge to superimpose onto my own life (other than observe how childish and unappreciative one of your favorite authors realistically is)
The problem lies in your expectation that these diaries should be “useful” to you in any way, let alone as a 1:1 guide for your own life.
I would argue though that you did gain some knowledge - that the private diaries of one of an author who was famously depressed and committed suicide require some adjustment from how you would approach their other writing.
What’s interesting is through your own conclusions you’ve demonstrated exactly what you attribute to her: a childish and unappreciative outlook. If you’re trying to learn something, this is it. This is the moment. And your response to these comments, what you do with them, will also be a growth opportunity. You’re missing the lessons by thinking they’re going to be obvious rather than taking every opportunity to be mindful, exploratory, and thinking critically.
have you ever thought maybe i’m going to draw a different conclusion about a person than you? based on what i’ve read, she was very fortunate, and i was much less so. so i will see her as ungrateful while also struggling with my depression, same as the author
I think you’re confused. Depression is a medical condition, while life circumstances can contribute, someone doesn’t have to have a terrible life to have depression. She didn’t choose it anymore than you did, she also lived in a time when much less was known about depression and there were not as many options to treat it. If you are looking for some clarity on your life, you should do some research on depression. Sylvia Path didn’t choose to have it and neither did you. People experience depression differently and you shouldn’t compare her struggle to yours. Your struggle is valid but so was hers. There might not be some big life lesson in her journals but you can take solace knowing you’re not alone, others have experienced depression as well.
Being 19 can be tough. I hope you find the knowledge, or mentorship, you’re looking for.
Ungrateful? Her brain chemistry didn’t work correctly. She had a medical condition…depression. Sylvia Plath is known for her depression and eventual suicide. Why do you think you would gain common sense from reading unedited journals of anyone? They’re just our most private thoughts, as they happen.
why are you trying to school me. i have depression and anxiety. it’s more constant for me than it was for the author
this isn’t a competition of whose depression and anxiety were the worse. this woman has been dead for 60 years.
Budget-Addendum-9405’s comment of you: “this reply is so unbelievably tone deaf” is right.
So you started reading published private diaries of someone who is also young at the time they were written, someone with severe enough mental issues that she later dies because of them, and you’ve added the expectation that they should be a roadmap to insights?
That is just not how this works.
And frankly the vast majority of the insights I have into life come from just living life, and reading books can sometimes help illuminate experiences in a more elegant manner for me to reflect upon.
OP seems to completely ignore her age at the time of writing which is just wild to me. Why is she expected to be more mature and moral? As you said, insights come from living and gaining experience. When I was in my teens and 20s, my bipolar was out of control. I was not someone to look up to. I did dangerous things and had a lot of sexual partners in questionable situations. I was also just young and young people can be jerks just like anyone else. If someone published my diary they would see a severely messed up person. I’m not her anymore, though, and I’ve learned to view myself and others with grace and understanding. Part of that was my experiences and part of it was reading about others.
Journals aren’t the same as memoir or works where someone is genuinely trying to reframe periods of their life as having some kind of narrative that they can gleam insight from. A journal is simply shit that happened, when, and with a bit of reflection. They’re useful to us trying to build a portrait and a timeline of someone’s life, but more often than not none of us were ever meant to see them.
ok, this is what i was looking for. yes i was thinking more of a memoir, i’ve been reading joan didion a lot. i see now
Insight from Plath? She was neurotic.
Besides, these journals were not written for publication.
yep - i see that now. idk why i had the mindset they were for publication at some point. it feels throughout that she is talking to a group of people
feel you. I thought that I would read sth amazing…nope. dnf-ed and didn t look back after. I was really disappointed. I didn t even like The Bell Jar so idk why I still bothered. maybe bc it s so praised (for nothing). but yeah, I m glad someone else dislikes it
Can you imagine writing about shit that hurts you in your personal diary, only for it to be dissected and criticised decades later for being “dull”? She didn’t write those entries to entertain you and she was mentally ill. What is your problem?
All people are just people. There is nobody with any special insight into being alive, and the people who claim to have special insight into being alive are either wrong or lying.
hmm this is actually making me feel better about the drivel I journal about… I’d come back from the grave and then promptly die again of embarrassment if anyone released my journals, though…
I have a promise from my family to destroy them.
I read the Colossus and thought I loved Sylvia Plath. Then I read Ariel and realized she kind of sucked both as a writer and as a person. Sorry she had depression (so do I), but I don’t think that explains all the ways she was a somewhat odious person. She seemed to revel in drama and bitterness and negativity- which is not a requirement of being depressed, it’s a choice. Her casual use of the N-word when there were better choices even at the time bothered me, among other things. I don’t think she’d be popular today if she wasn’t already revered.
I dont like how critical you are being
Its actually rather selfish and entitled to trawl through a writers never meant to be published private thoughts, and instead of reading them to get more in-depth knowledge of their distilled work you pick it apart expecting them to help you with your issues.
Thats what a therapist is for. All this is doing is looking for justification for your own nonsense, and then blaming them for not agreeing with you, or being helpful
Read it just for the fun of it, she was a girl writing in her journal.
I guess I’m confused why you thought a nineteen-year-old who eventually kills herself due to her perceived hopelessness would have more common sense than you. Sylvia Plath, for all the gripping art she constructed, is one of the last people I would turn to for common sense.
Personal journals and memoirs tend to be like that. The person writing them often did not intend for them to be seen by others in the first place, unless they specifically wanted their memoir published. They reveal a person at their best and their worst. Thinking that an artist whose art speaks to you must be similar to you in character, compatible with you or a person you should strife to be is a very common misconception. They might be all of that, or they might be not. Someone might be a great artist and a terrible person, and that’s a perfectly realistic combination. Private journals do not exist to be guides to life. Many artists out there were tortured souls whose life was full of trauma, misery, bad decisions and struggles with mental health. It’s great to look up to them in terms of art, but emulating their life or looking to them for actual advice is not healthy. Sylvia Plath wasn’t a therapist, she was a clinically depressed young woman who took her own life. If you do not connect with her and find some of her actions immoral, that’s a perfectly valid opinion to have about someone, but her journals weren’t written to teach other young women how to live their lives, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Use them to make observations about the realities of the time period, life events that might have influenced the writer’s art, or just treat it as a vintage vent blog. It’s better to turn to a professional therapist if you need genuine advice about navigating life as a neurodivergent person.