My Sylvia Plath Moments (My art revisited)

My Sylvia Plath Moments — by Alison Friday

Last modified: 22/04/25

Mid‑life has given me my own Sylvia Plath moments — not in the catastrophic sense, but in the emotional weather of it. Poetry, hormones, imbalance, the break, the fall‑down, the sudden drop in the day when everything tilts. Mine arrive in the monotony of cooker‑top life, the domestic loop, the repetition that can feel like a trap.

When I finally read The Bell Jar, I heard her clearly. The darkness, the sadness, the giving‑away of self. I’m lucky I didn’t read it young; it would have swallowed me whole. Now I read it with distance, with age, with the knowledge that my own dips are temporary, not terminal.

My Plath moments are flashes — the brain fog, the heaviness, the sudden emotional collapse at 4:30. The Jekyll & Hyde days. The PM‑and‑yet days. The ones where the morning version of me is fine and the afternoon version is gone. They’re part hormonal, part history, part mid‑life re calibration — but mostly neurodivergent hormonal imbalance.

I write them down. I stitch them into my art. I let them exist without shame or fear.

These are my Sylvia Plath moments — not an ending, but a recognition.