In Review: The Midnight Library

Book reviews are especially delicious when they're for the latest book to make it to my favorites shelf. I had a feeling that the I was going to love the Midnight Library by Matt Haig from the moment I read the first few words, “Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed…”  It really didn’t even matter what the rest of that sentence was. This M.C. knew darkness, and if you’ve been following my theme this month, darkness is something I can relate to. This story, like everything that the universe delivers, came to me when I needed it. As I have trudged through my forties and managed to find new shades of darkness, Nora’s story helped me come back to truths I already knew and helped me to make sense of my life.

As a spiritual person, I understand the concept that we should not regret anything, for everything in life is a lesson, but, still, we all have them. I think most of the big regrets are about our wish to have been a better person, although sometimes we wish we would have aimed for greater success. But we can’t focus on the regrets, or we will lose our minds. That is exactly what Nora does in this book. She focuses so heavily on her regrets, that her perspective is tainted. When we only focus on the garbage, it’s like we have that stinking, rotting waste covering our field of vision; we can only see trash even if there are flowers growing at our feet.  This is where Nora is when the book opens; she can only see the garbage in her life.

We all have trash we need to dispose of, though it comes in different forms for all of us. There are times where the garbage just seems to pile up so fast that it feels like we are drowning in it all. When things just seem to go wrong every time we turn around, it feels like we are at the dump and might as well give up rather than attempt to climb over it all. As Nora already struggles with depression, a few last incidents put her over the edge to bring her to the place where she decides to die.

After Nora makes that choice and takes action, she lands in the Midnight Library, a place where she has the opportunity to access not only her own personal book of regrets, but books that hold the stories to other lives she might have led. Now, for those of you spiritual folks, think of this in terms of parallel universes or alternate timelines; there are so many lives we can lead, right? Nora’s guide once at the library is Mrs. Elm, who was her high school librarian, a kind woman who helped her through some dark times. When she arrives at the library, Mrs. Elm tells her, “Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.”  Indeed. Although I have always been an all or nothing chick, who wants to dive in fully instead of taking baby steps, I am coming to realize that the things I once saw as small steps, are the things that are vital to changing your life. Oh, I still swear and complain about these small steps all the time, but I finally see that there are no shortcuts. As we say in the world of trauma survivors, “the only way out is through.”

As Nora lives a dozen or so other lives that might have been, she learns to see everything differently, herself included,“everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it.” Instead of only seeing the worthless soul she once thought she was, she learns that, “A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.” Our humanity is hard to swallow. No one gets it easy. It took me a long time to see that. Sure, some have it harder; I am the first one to stand up for the underdog, but everyone struggles and has to face the fact that they are flawed human beings at some point. But once Nora begins to live the different lives available to her, the ones she is convinced would have been better, she sees that those lives are not without misery; the misery only comes in different flavors.

When you see a new perspective, sometimes regrets disappear, because, “you can choose choices, but not outcomes.”  We can’t be sure that any one choice would have led us to happiness. We are meant to encounter struggle and learn the lessons.  When you start to analyze the lives you might have led, the choices you might have made, hopefully you can begin to see that all that changed in those lives was YOU. And here and now, just as in those parallel lives, you have the opportunity to change. Even one change makes the whole story different. When Nora leads other versions of her life, some of the pieces she valued from her root life no longer existed. The truth is, you might gain something by leading a different life, but you will always lose something else.

It is only through living other possible lives that Nora figures out what she really wants. It is not the versions of success she once thought she wanted. It wasn’t even the perfect relationships she had envisioned. She simply wanted to live—for it is through living that we navigate our humanity and gain the wisdom we are meant to. Sometimes you have to come close to dying to know how badly you want to live. Although I have struggled with depression my entire life, I really don’t think I have ever been truly suicidal. But I HAVE seen a lot of versions of me die, and sometimes, for those of us who still haven’t conquered attachment, that can be close enough. When we are forced to say goodbye to past versions of ourselves, it can be bittersweet.

Society programs us with messages about what we should be like. “Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough.” I can relate, but sometimes the world has made me feel like I was too much too. Not pretty enough. Not hard working enough. Too outspoken. Too much of a dreamer. Well, fuck all of that. If we can learn to embrace every version of ourselves, but also remain committed to growth, that just has to be enough.

The Midnight Library gets wonderfully trippy at points as Nora meets others like her who have the opportunity to live the other versions of their lives. She and a friend discuss how quantum physics suggests we can and do live every possibility simultaneously, and that it’s the choices we make in every moment that whisk us away to our new realities. But, “minds can’t see what they can’t handle,” so if that’s too crazy for you, please just ignore it and move on.

Nora nails it when she says, “I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood that there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. She had wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with human in them.” Yes, along with happiness, life brings sadness, and we humans hurt one another sometimes. Hopefully we feel badly when cause pain and use that guilt to become kinder, because if we just live with that guilt festering inside of us, we’re just going to become meaner and add to the garbage heap. We have to forgive ourselves for paths not taken, opportunities not even noticed, and choices we can see better alternatives to, now that we are wiser. Forgiving ourselves and other for being human clears some of the garbage away and allows us to see the flowers growing at our feet.

It can help us to calm our overthinking when we realize, “You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.” This has been a hard concept for me to accept, because, like Nora, I have the need to overanalyze EVERYTHING. I used to feel the need to understand how things would turn out, and in doing so, tended to miss the value of the moments themselves. In one of her lives, Nora tells someone she loves very much, “When you have worries about things you don’t know about, like the future, it’s a very good idea to remind yourself of the things you do know.” Remind yourself of who loves you. Remind yourself that you’re only human and learn to love yourself. Finally, remind yourself that you are here, breathing in this moment and let that be enough.  

Instead of thinking about the lives we could have led, the choices we could have made differently, think about the magic of the life you did choose and know in your soul that you have made a difference in the world by just being this version of you. Think about all the room you still have to grow into a better version of yourself. “Want is an interesting word. It means lack.” If Buddhism teaches us one thing, it is how society can program us to believe we are lacking so many things, when in fact, if we are here today, we have always had everything we needed to live. Nora realized, “that the prison wasn’t in the pain, but in the perspective.”  

~Peace and Love, Tracey

©Tracey Love, 2021. All rights reserved.