Sylvia Plath’s fig tree has always stuck with me. Early in my career, I treated opportunities as mutually exclusive: choose one fig and all the others disappear. So when someone asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” it felt less like an invitation and more like a commitment. Whatever came out of my mouth seemed to close off everything else. I’m still not sure I can answer that question definitively.

But life rarely works that way. You can have a fig, then reach for another. You can take a bite and decide it isn’t for you. A choice can be meaningful without being permanent. There’s a lot of doomerism floating around the abyss we call the internet, and staring into it for too long has a way of shaping what you expect to find. I’d rather believe there are still plenty of us imagining different lives, changing our minds, and reaching for what might come next.

I made this experiment as a small artifact of that collective hope. If you added a response, thank you for leaving a little evidence that it’s still out there.