"Sittin' on the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll away…"

"The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
"I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
"From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Shoot. Replace "poet" with "author", "Gee" with "Bee", and "lady crew champion" with "reporter", and you've got my exact situation. Esther and I are even the same age.
Here I was, listening to the rain and thinking I was original, only to find that my life has been written before. To critical aclaim, no less. I am just an intertextual speck.
Now, on page 120, Esther is starting a novel. Ooo, shock me again.
Again, shoot.
I'd better stay away from gas ovens.