For Anyone Who’s Ever Wondered If It’s Worth It—Read This

I picked up The Midnight Library by Matt Haig during a time when I didn’t want to be here anymore.

Not in the poetic, passing sense. I mean it honestly. I was sitting in the thick fog of depression, questioning the point of it all, wondering if anyone would really notice if I disappeared. Life felt like a series of regrets and wrong turns, each one weighing heavier than the last. I wasn’t reading to escape—I was reading because I needed something, anything, to hold onto.

And somehow, this book became that thing.

The story follows Nora Seed, a woman who, much like I did, feels like she’s at the end. The pain, the loneliness, the sheer exhaustion of trying to exist—it was all so painfully familiar. When Nora tries to take her own life, she wakes up in the Midnight Library, a strange place between life and death where each book holds a version of her life lived differently. A choice made, a path taken, a dream followed—or not.

She gets the chance to step into these other lives, to see what might have been if only she had done things “right.”

I won’t lie—this story hurt. It was like watching someone else walk through your own mind, picking up pieces of your past, holding up the “what ifs” you’ve tried so hard to bury. I saw myself in Nora’s disappointment, in the quiet ache of her hopelessness, and in the numbness that comes when you’ve stopped expecting life to offer you more.

But what wrecked me—and somehow healed me—was the truth that emerged in each version of her life: every path had pain. Every dream came with a cost. There were beautiful moments, yes. Love. Success. Adventure. But also loneliness, loss, compromise, and struggle. Nora learned what I needed so desperately to believe—that no version of life is perfect. That happiness isn’t about getting it all right. It’s about finding something worth staying for, even in the mess.

There were so many alternate lives that gutted me—The one where she becomes a glaciologist, living out a childhood dream only to feel crushing loneliness in the Arctic silence.The one where she becomes a famous swimmer, only to lose herself in the pressure of perfection.The one where she marries the man she thought was “the one,” only to find out the life she mourned was never really hers to begin with.

Each life made me ask the same question: What if the thing I’m grieving never would’ve saved me in the first place?

And that question shook something loose in me.

By the end, when Nora begins to understand that her “root life”—the one she had tried to end—was still full of possibility, I cried. I sobbed, actually. Because it gave me permission to hope. Permission to believe that maybe, just maybe, this life I’m living—the messy, broken one—isn’t a punishment. Maybe it’s not too late to write a new chapter.

Not perfect. Not painless. But real. And still mine.

The Midnight Library isn’t a miracle cure. It didn’t erase my depression. It didn’t fix me. But it did make me feel seen. It reminded me that regret is universal, that pain doesn’t mean failure, and that even on the days when I feel completely lost, I’m still here. Still choosing.

That is no small thing.

If you’ve ever struggled with suicidal thoughts, if you’ve ever felt like a ghost in your own life, if you've ever laid awake wishing you could trade places with another version of yourself—read this book. Let it sit with you. Let it hurt. Let it hold your hand.

Because sometimes, the thing that keeps us going isn’t some grand revelation—it’s a quiet reminder that there are still pages left in our story.

And you don’t have to write them all at once. Just one more page. One more day.

That’s enough.