The Midnight Library

 

Nora is having a truly horrible day. life's never been easy as her wedding's off, her cat died, she's fired (twice), soaked through, & ghosted by family. her life's going nowhere. overwhelmed by regret & loneliness, with nothing to give, no one to love, & nobody loves her in return, Nora decides life's no longer worth living & she's done. but instead of her life ending, she lands in the Midnight Library, a place between life & death where she's able to live all the lives that would have been if she had made different choices. as she's experiencing a variety of potential lives, she gets to see her 'root' life with a newfound perspective. she's then torn between staying the course and plotting a new path.

i googled Matt Haig and he's apparently extremely popular with this kind of story. he writes about the idiosyncrasies of being human & what makes us tick. what's normal, what are other people’s lives like, what are we here for, what’s the point. this novel isn't as light as it looks. there's a lot of philosophy here, well pitched for non-philosophers. and i love it. so creative, thought-provoking, lyrical, & emotionally cathartic.

it teaches perspective, regrets, & how we should approach life. it's impossible to read this book without thinking about my own regrets & what i'd do differently. eventually, Nora has some fairly profound epiphanies about life which i've tucked away for those moments in life when i feel weighed down by similar regrets. my favorite part is about our limitless potential, the importance of moving forward rather than wallowing in "should haves" & how each life is valuable, even if we might not see it. every life is a mix of happiness & sadness, success & failure. the presence of downfalls doesn't always make life worth living.

Uncertainty

recently i learned about John Keats' idea of negative capability.

in its simplest form, Keats' theory describes the ability to accept uncertainty - the capacity to have two opposing ideas in your mind without trying to choose one over the other. it's the ability to believe that two contrasting things are true, both of them, and that they can exist side by side.

or, in other words, being satisfied with things that are unresolved.

and, well, wow. It struck a chord with me, this theory. how often i find myself trying to sort between black and white, yes and no, this way or that, when really, at the end of the day, what i'd actually like to settle on is both. yes and yes. true and true.

because it's possible, it is, to both love and loathe. to both admire and pity. to both appreciate and, just as truly, just as ardently, regret. it's possible that what's right is not just a matter of either/or, that it's not somewhere in-between, that it's simply both.

for whatever reason, it's difficult to accept ambiguity; it can be a struggle to embrace that sort of doubt. and yet it happens. to all of us.  at some point or another, we know in our hearts that it's not A or B.

it's C: all of the above.

so am i

"hello" seems too formal, and "remember me?" seems ridiculous. i know you remember me, because i remember you. that was never going to be in question. the bigger challenge was whether we’d ever be able to forget.

i haven’t thought of you every day. but i haven’t never thought of you, either. when i do, it isn’t the kind of recollection that feels wispy or comforting. it's visceral, the clean cut of a sword. one moment you are not in my mind and the next, you are so sharp and intense that all my attention is focused there.

so you see, even after all this time, you take my breath away.

time is a construct. our brains take 80 milliseconds to process information, did you know that? anyone who tells you to live in the here and now is a liar. by the time you pin the present down, it’s already the past.

if you had asked me back then where we would be 10 years later, i would've laughed and asked why, when we had today? i wouldn't have admitted to you, to anyone, that every now and then when i lifted my head from your shoulder and peered into the future, i could imagine you, and me, but not us.

i guess that’s the part no one ever tells you. you can love someone so much your teeth ache, so much that it feels like he is carrying your heart in his own rib cage, but none of it matters if you can’t find a practical way to be together. it’s like learning that you would be immortal if you could breathe nitrogen, but knowing you are bound to the oxygen of earth.

i was the meteor that crashed into your life when you were already living it. i didn’t have any more control over my landing than you did when you froze, looking up at the inevitable sky. you had a past and a plan and responsibilities. you had someone who already loved you. we were gasoline poured onto fire. with you i burned twice as high and hot.

for a while i was angry at you, because i had almost missed this.. someone i didn’t just want to be with, but someone i wanted to be more like. you were the bright shiny thing at the corner of my consciousness. i made myself look away.

well, none of this matter anymore now. but because you're reading this, i know that as long as you’re here, so am i. 

Live by Desire

 it can be difficult to separate what you truly desire from what you've been taught to want, particularly when it comes to love. do you wanna get married because you see it as a chance to create a meaningful commitment, or because you feel a peer pressure to? do you wanna have a baby because you long to be a mother, or because you assume it’s a box that has to be ticked in order to be happy? 

sometimes, even when we think we're making these decisions from a true place, there are cultural expectations & assumptions & family histories pressed up against our thoughts, which can make it tricky to figure out what we really desire for ourselves.

what i learned is that it's all about living by your desire. and it's important to figure out what your desire is, whether that's to marry & have kids or to create a new circle, & to stop making decisions based on the boxes that are already there.

Moving Past Heartbreak

how do you get over heartbreak?

my short answer? you don't. you never do.

here's the long answer:

every heartbreak is different, of course. one of my closest friends got over a lost love by simply ignoring the hurt until it went away. another wrote about it, talked about it, and ached over it until the pain finally dulled. the next time her heart broke, it felt easier. muscle memory, i told her.

heartbreak can strike in the span of a second, or it can scratch at you slowly, over months or years, a gradual etching away at your insides until you feel completely carved out. i've felt it both ways, and i'm not sure which is worse. how could heartbreak ever be better or worse?

honestly, the "getting over it" phase has never really been my strong suit (understatement of the century). i'm not exactly a feel-and-let-go kind of person, not in any aspect of my life. i hold onto people and places and memories as if they'll float away without my desperate, determined grip. sometimes it's a great strength, and sometimes it's an awful, miserable flaw. either way, it has helped me learn.

you can't dodge the heartbreak. you can't try to outsmart it or duck behind it because you have to trudge through it, through the heavy, dirty muck of it until that one strange day when you're driving down a hill, the sun's setting, the air tastes like salt, and you suddenly realize that you're in the clear. you realize that you've made it to the other side, but the heartbreak isn't in your wake. you didn't leave it behind. no, you're carrying it with you, you're wearing it, breathing it, feeling it in small doses at random moments, on random days. it has become part of you.

the point is, then, that you don't get over heartbreak. you embrace it. right?