an entry by Plath.

“I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who love better, who live better than I…After being conditioned as a child to the lovely never-never land of magic, of fairy queens and virginal maidens, of little princes and their rosebushes, of poignant bears and Eeyore-ish donkeys, of life personalized, as the pagans loved it, of the magic wand, and the faultless illustrations—the beautiful dark-haired child (who was you) winging through the midnight sky on a star-path in her mother’s box of reels—of Griselda in her feather cloak, walking barefoot with the Cuckoo in the lantern-lit world of nodding mandarins, of Delight in her flower garden with the slim limbed flower sprites, of the Hobbit and the dwarves, golden-belted with blue and purple hoods, drinking ale and singing dragons in the caverns of the valley—all this I knew, and felt and believed. All this was my life when I was young. To go from this to a world of “grown-up” reality. To feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thickening to feel the sex…To feel the sex organs develop and call loud to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams, bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice in Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life? To learn snide and smutty meanings. To go to college fraternity parties where a boy buries his face in your neck and tries to rape you if he isn’t satisfied with burying his hand in your breast. To learn that there are a million girls who are beautiful and that each day more leave behind the awkward teenage stage, as you once did and embark on the journey of being loved and petted. To be aware that you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm. To learn that a boy will make a careless remark about “your side of town” as he drives you to a roadhouse in his father’s latest chromium-plated convertible. To learn that you might have been more of an artist than you are if you had been born into a family of wealthy intellectuals. To learn that you can never learn anything valid for truth, only momentary, transitory sayings that apply to you in your moment, your locality, your present state of mind. To learn that love can never come true, because the people you admire are unattainable since they want someone else. To learn that you only want them because you can’t have them. To yearn for an organism of the opposite sex to comprehend that most American males worship woman as a sex machine with rounded breasts, as a painted doll who shouldn’t have a thought in her pretty head other than cooking a steak dinner and comforting him in bed after a 9-5 day a routine business job.”

~Sylvia Plath