5 Quotes from ‘The Midnight Library’ That Improved My Understanding of Anxiety and Regret

As well as how I currently cope with these strong feelings

Book: The Midnight Library Author: Matt Haig

The Midnight Library is a book that I disappeared into and emerged several hours later, my life changed. For one, I related to the main protagonist. She was a bookworm and some of her deepest friendships were with librarians.

As a book about multiple parallel lives borne out of multiple choices, it was also comforting to read during the pandemic. I’m at a crossroads in numerous aspects of my life, being just shy off the mid-twenty line. There are big, scary decisions I need to make about my career, my relationships and my finances that all feel like they could fall to shambles if I make the wrong step.

This story is one that directly tackles that anxiety that comes from people who calculate all the possible endings to each choice. Is that you? Stay buckled in for the ride. If it’s not you, come join us anyways! It’s likely you know a dear friend who is exactly like this. We’re known to populate the world.

Enclosed are also reflection prompts that you can use as journal prompts or personal essay prompts, whatever works for you. You do not have to read the book in order to use these questions. Rather, they are questions crafted from the essence of this book, ready to be applied to anyone, anywhere.

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?

Do you ever fail to describe something simply because there aren’t the tangible examples to describe it? Like there’s something abstract that you’re trying to grasp and it weighs into your anxiety, but it’s not tangible enough that you can tackle it?

I’m pretty sure that being at a life crossroads is not unique or new to anyone reading this. But the analogy of having a library filled with books that tell the story of another you that exists purely because they made a different choice — that resonated with me. It gave me a tangible metaphor to go to to understand my own choices.

After I read this book, whenever I felt uncertain about a choice, I thought about all the possible books that could exist from the limited outcomes that are generated from my options. I envisioned myself in each and every outcome.

In a way, it was a tangible way to accept these outcomes, understanding exactly what I would like about each option, but also accepting the downfall. The experiential piece of having a book that details that story takes me out of the ping pong between a cold, hard list of pros and cons to the real-life emotions of walking a mile in those shoes.

It’s incredible how sometimes decisions don’t matter. It’s incredible how taking those steps helps me realize that I’d actually be pretty okay in all of the scenarios that might come out of my decision. There’s an element of acceptance when you step out of the abstract and into the reality of an option.

Reflection prompts:

• What metaphors or analogies have been helpful in communicating or experiencing things that previously stayed in the abstract, swirling around in your brain?
• How has imagining something experientially been helpful to you to step out of the cold, hard abstract of lists of pros and cons?

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.

If anything, listening to this being quoted in the book immediately made me think of Amy Marley, who always ends off her responses with “thank you for being you”.

To be honest, the first time I heard it, I appreciated it but didn’t internalize it. But, by the kindness of her continued responses and the repetition, I somehow just absorbed it into my thinking. It was a foreign language I was becoming fluent in.

So when I heard this quote via audiobook, I recognized it immediately. Aiming to be yourself and to be true to your values is crucial because I’d too often been swept into choices that contrasted my values and led to resentment. I’d fallen into external expectations and peer pressure that I’d forgotten to be myself too.

The main protagonist is the epitome of this, and I saw my past self in her. In seeing my past self in her I also witnessed exactly how far I came simply by noticing what I valued and starting to craft my decisions around these values, even imperfectly.

And that’s the incredible thing that books can do sometimes. They hold a mirror to your existing growth journey. Sometimes, it provides you with the ghost of the future, of something you can aspire to. Sometimes, it provides you with the ghost of the past, showing exactly how far you’ve come.

Reflection prompts:

• What are some sayings that have been said around you enough that you’ve genuinely internalized them? What sayings or thoughts would you like to internalize?
• What characters from fiction (books, TV shows or movies) do you aspire to be more similar to? What characters from fiction show the story of who you used to be and highlight how far you’ve come?

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.

Any city-themed simile reminds me of my conceptualization of how ideas run rampant in my brain, like a city of people who don’t know each other that come in and out of buildings at their leisure.

And this simile can kind of be connected with that. The main theme of this quote is to highlight a sense of acceptance, that there are good neighbourhoods and weird neighbourhoods in cities, but it’s the good stuff that makes it worthwhile.

I might have an incredible number of thoughts, but I also have a number of negative thoughts alongside good ones. Currently, I mostly have good ones with the occasional weird one, and that’s a result of systematically funding the right facilities to nourish the entire city in the form of a solid self care routine.

I acknowledge that there are good and bad neighbourhoods in this bustling city that I call my brain, and I can accept things for how they are now. I can also deliberately ensure that I’m funding the right programs to nourish even the most anxious of thoughts. After all, my trillion-question-asking sense of anxiety is simply curiosity when I’m asking them from a safe space.

Reflection prompts:

• What is your brain-city like? What comprises the neighbourhoods within those cities?
• What do you accept about the composition of your brain-city? What requires more deliberate routine support?

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

It’s so crucial that this is where the narrative ends up. Despite having the option to choose any and all books from the library of possibilities, there was only one route that felt right to our main protagonist.

In reality, we don’t have that choice. We might be able to increase acceptance using fictional metaphors drawn from books, but in the end, there is only one existence.

We can be many things, but not all of them at the same time. The work contributing to multiple roles in life starts with different steps taken at different times.

I think this quote tackles the other side of what I mentioned in the first quote. While the first quote highlights an experience of feeling burdened by the infinite possibilities, this quote points to the weight of regret of having locked into one.

It’s interesting because I personally encounter regret less than I do anxiety. I’m more threatened by what’s to come than what’s already happened. Acceptance seems to come more easily to me, which is unsurprising that one anxiety coping strategy that I have is to simply expose myself to these outcomes as if I’d already encountered them.

Reflection prompts:

• What roles do regret of the past or anxiety about the future play for you? Which one bothers you more? What are some reasons that influence that?
• How do cope with regret? How do you cope with anxiety? Why do you think these ways of coping have been effective for you? Is there more or something different that you want to try?

As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

As someone who has yet to delve into Thoreau’s work, it was nice to see his philosophies woven into the narrative as an appetizer to this body of work, as the main protagonist is a philosophy major.

In fact, this quote really fits with how I’m crafting these book reviews. I almost don’t need to reveal any plot or characterization and can strategically discuss the lessons I’ve gleaned from this experience. It’s how I’ve interpreted the story that I’ve read and the characters that I related to that are most important in generating my reactions and reflection prompts.

In a way, I hope this is the experience that I give to readers. It does not matter if they remember this exact piece that I wrote, or how I worded it. It matters more to me what takeaways they had and how it impacted how they think or even how they act in their daily life.

Reflection prompts:

• What do you see from the quote: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see”?
• In what ways do you reflect on seemingly straightforward events, stories and news to extrapolate meaning that relates more directly to you?

Overall, this was a great book to disappear into and emerge from a few hours later. From this story alone, I’ve reflected deeply on metaphors that help me describe my experiences with anxiety about the future and regret about the past. I reflected on analogies that help describe my existing coping strategies (i.e., acceptance) and what my brain looks like if you peer into the thoughts (a city!). From this all, reflecting on these experiences beyond their surface meaning has been fruitful, even if none of this is originally what the author intended.

Today I learned the term death of the author from the Writers For Change Speaker Series with Brian Gilmore (aka - Bumpy J). It refers to how written pieces are at the mercy of readers as soon as its published. He talked about the meticulous intention in writing craft as readers can interpret it any way they’d like, based on their own lens, for better or for worse.

In this book review (or reflection?), I saw the concept in action right away, hopefully for the better. Without the explicit intention of the author (or maybe it was intended? I’ll never know), I’d been able to learn more about myself in ways that I have not stopped to reflect on before.

So now I’m passing off the baton to you, with my ideas and reflection prompts. Use them however you’d like.

If you do write a published response, please feel free to submit it to The Brain is a Noodle or tag me so I can be sure to read it and share it on social media!

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and this book review is part of my new Noodle Book Club! You can find more information here:

Previous Book Club reviews!