Like the T-shirts on Etsy, the tattoo designs are impressively diverse in their colors and placements and the substance of their messages. But I find myself returning over and over to an image of skin bearing the haunting finale of The Bell Jar: “I am, I am, I am.” Sometimes it is unpunctuated. Sometimes it is etched next to an ideographic heart, and other times it is etched onto a realistic rendering of the heart as human organ. Sometimes it is accompanied by its preceding line, “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.” I struggle to think of any line of thinking more linked to being a socialized female than to consider the declaration of simply existing to feel like a form of bragging. But that, of course, is the plight of the feeling girl: to be told again and again that her very existence is something not worth declaring.
To read Sylvia’s diaries is to bear witness to an urgent catastrophe. Though the entries are not marked with dates, it quickly becomes clear that the days she chronicles are eventful only insofar as her feelings are events themselves. And that they are. New boys have approximately the same weight as the whole wide world, yet they have taken the liberty of taking up much more than their physically allotted spaces with larger gestures and excessive speech. They suffocate girls’ spaces, their intrusions of volume and flesh lingering long after they’ve left. “In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in,” she confesses, a rare and raw admission of how much we sometimes crave the opportunity to crawl into the arms of men who cannot or choose not to love us as fully as we do them. Sylvia describes the fickle affections of men in her early years in one-dimensional terms, speaking in the absolutist language that would come to characterize her observations of life in early adulthood. She writes, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity.” Sylvia does not have just best friends, she has the absolute best friends that history has ever produced. “She is something vital,” she writes of a dear friend, imbuing the girl not just with significance in her life but with life-giving properties no less critical than the beat of a heart or the shine of the sun. Her experience of love has similarly high stakes. “What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?” Plath experiences first love as a reincarnation, unable to remember a time when her body had any purpose but the love before her. These are not expressions of hyperbole so much as they are expressions of gravity. These diaries are an exercise in the belief that the ordinary female life is no ordinary thing at all.
When she considers what it means to be a young woman, she feels the full weight of both its peculiar fragility and its attendant lack of mercies. Sylvia knows full well that the world had neither her particular intellect nor her body in mind when it was designed. At eighteen, she berates herself for the urge to gaze inward, but she cannot find a reprieve from her own fascination:
I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.
Sylvia was an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly. She is at once her own documentarian and the reflexive voice that says she is unworthy of documentation. She sends her image into the world to be seen, discussed, and devoured, proclaiming that the ordinariness or ugliness of her existence does not remove her right to have it. You might be so very good and generous if you could only relinquish that nagging sense that you matter at all, the world tells them now and told Sylvia then. The ongoing act of self-documentation in a world that punishes female experience (that doesn’t aspire to maleness) is a radical declaration that women are within our rights to contribute to the story of what it means to be a human. I look to the girls and women who adore Sylvia on Tumblr and mourn that I had no such home for self-expression and mourn for a world that won’t allow itself to behold the richness of their lives as the art of ingénues rather than the nuisances of adolescence.
Clicking through the profiles of girls who share Sylvia-related images and words, it is not uncommon to find images of self-inflicted wounds displayed through carefully selected filters. Reds are turned up and backgrounds are darkened. There is a young Parisian whose scroll is a well-curated collection of literary quotations relating to the discomfort of being human. Another describes herself as having a “rebel soul and a whole lot of gypsy,” her account a gallery celebrating literature and landscapes meant to break the heart. These young women awaken a maternal impulse in me, and at some points I get close to reaching out to encourage them to get care. I realize this is both invasive and unproductive at first, but I later realize that it is an underestimation of their capabilities. The very act of sharing the images is a way of seeking care, not as cries for help or as declarations of their suffering. Their blood is proof that something is alive in them. They are making art of their pain. Many experience these platforms as communities where their pain is acknowledged in gentle, more reassuring ways than those available from family and in-person peers.
“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self—like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion,” Sylvia wrote. I wish I could tell them to stop hurting themselves and have them miraculously listen. I also want to tell them that I am so happy they’ve found one another instead of finding the back of an oven. I want to tell them that the contagion source is not dispersed in the blood but in fissures in the heart. These fissures do not course through the body and require an aggressive medicinal annihilation. They require the tender touch of one willing to deal with the brokenness of the flesh, and they require the trust of the wounded heart’s owner to know that their insides can and should be beheld.
I want to call out to the girls who repeat Sylvia’s poisonous directive, “I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.” This is a fallacy, a lie intended to kill the spirits of girls so that they might become what we have come to expect of women. It is telling that among the ranks of quotes on Goodreads and in the bottomless scrolls on Tumblr, it is words from Sylvia’s earlier works in her late teens and early twenties that are the most popular. The girls may repeat her longing to grow from glitter to glow, but their affections favor glitter overwhelmingly. Glitter is the unbridled multitudes of shining objects that have no predictable trajectory and no particular use but their own splendor. A glow is contained. Its purpose is to offer a light bright enough that those who bear it will cast a shadow, but not so bright that their features will come fully into focus. “Never surrender your glitter” sounds like the cliché battle cry of a cheerleading coach or a pageant mom, but I still find it a suitable message for young girls. I also want to show them a line of Sylvia’s poem “Stings,” written from the point of view of a bee: