da bell jar

Ever since I got back from New York, while unemployed, I've kept up a pretty strict regimen of reading and writing. I've tried to alternate between reading new books and re-reading old books that I read when I was a lot younger. The last one I finished was The Bell Jar.
The copy I read was the copy I first read from when I was 12. What made this so good are all the great notes and markings I made. Such as underlining a passage and writing "WOWEE!" because I was fucking 12. Or underlining a passage about categorizing people not based on gender, age, social status, etc, but rather on whether or not they were virgins, and writing "Thank god," because I specifically remember being comforted by the fact that I was not the only one who thought this. It was pretty cute getting little glimpses into my 12 year old self. What was also weird was how when I first read it, I hadn't had my epic mental collapse yet, but I think I still felt a connection with some of the things she said, like there was a part of me deep down that sensed what was going to happen eventually.
And then there's this passage, from Chapter 20:
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."
And then a few pages later:
"I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday -- at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere -- the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"
Re-reading The Bell Jar was scary and emotional. I knew that the book was good. But now that I've been through what Plath/Esther Greenwood went through, it's absolutely terrifying how completely spot ON Plath was about what happens. It doesn't matter that it was the 60s and I was in the 00s or that she was 19 and I was 17, it's the exact same thing. And when she gets (successful) electroshock therapy in the mental hospital and suddenly feels the bell jar lifted, and is amazed at how much clearer the world is . . . it is identical to the way I felt, also in the mental hospital, when my antidepressents kicked in for the first time and I could just breathe. I could stop crying and breathe and think.
So if you ever wonder what it's like to go nuts, get better, and still live in fear of going nuts again, read The Bell Jar.