"...I lift my lids and all is born again."
Today on the way to work I finished “Mad Girl’s Love Song”, a biography of Sylvia Plath.
I loved it; I found it very insightful, very gripping and very thought provoking. However, as it ended with her meeting Ted Hughes (as the latter part of her life has been well documented elsewhere) I have been left hungry for more.
It feels very odd to be hungry for a person. I wish to devour them, mind and soul. I want her letters, her words, her thoughts inside me, in my stomach to churn and digest.
I’ve always loved Sylvia Plath, and the more I read of her work and about the woman herself the more I feel an affinity to the ill-fated poet. She looked for doubles and I see her as mine. In the grip of a depression her words resonate with me, in exhilaration only mania brings I see her fevered soul in my eyes.
Is this dangerous? To identify so closely to a woman who took her own life, who indeed seemed destined to do so? My Mother once told me she foresaw and dreaded the day I would abscond from my life, disappear without a goodbye, unable to continue to try and solve the problems I saw with living. Well, she didn’t say it anywhere near as prosaically or as pretentiously as that, but you catch my meaning.
I don’t want to give up on life, but I don’t want to bury that side of me; sometimes at my most broken I feel like my most authentic self. How twisted is that?
*Quote from Sylvia Plath
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