The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

cleansers and moisturisers she’d seen in the bathroom, which were all more expensive than anything she owned in her root life.

Would be interesting to test how effective they are irl :O

what was otherwise a rather frictionless existence. No relationship stress, no work stress, no money stress. It was a lot to be grateful for.

She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’

And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through.

Plato padded happily to greet her.

Kinda debating naming future dog after philosopher

But I suppose, maybe . . . it wasn’t my life. I hadn’t made it by myself. I had walked into this other version of me. I was carbon-copied into the perfect life. But it wasn’t me.’

Want is an interesting word. It means lack. So, she crossed that out and tried again. Nora decided to live. Nothing. She tried again. Nora was ready to live.

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be.

It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

This is how i feel about my childhood at times!!

She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.