A real 'How to' in how to live your 'Best Life'
"It's easy to mourn the lives we aren't living." This is a direct quote from Matt Haig's The Midnight Library, this week's book musing about the "choices of a life well lived". Apparently, before you die, you get to go to a library, and all the books inside are lives you could have lived if you had chosen differently. Chosen what, you might ask? Anything.
Obviously the book focuses on the main character's biggest decisions, the ones she regrets the most. Regret. This is the word of the story for me. The book can easily be turned, if read lightly, into a tale of 'live life with no regrets', or worse, a toxic positivity spin can actually paint it as 'live your best life'. Best life... Hmm..
I've read Matt Haig's analysis of his own work and what he thinks his own book is about, and to him it is an obvious mirror of his own life, as all books are mirrors of their authors, but what caught my attention was how he thinks of the ways to avoid the 'what ifs' of our lives, and how, from my own experience, unfeasible it is to do so in the society and times we live in today, without help.
I, personally, have a bite the bullet personality. I never really cared what others would think of my decisions, being driven by hormones and curiosity most of my life, and I've always paid whatever price I had to to check this or that experience off my bucket list. I can't say this is right or wrong, this binary existence is long past me, and I came to terms with the people I have hurt to be able to do all those things, from family members to friends lost, you can't live intensely without leaving some people behind, after all, what I have learned from my short, but lived life is that not everyone will understand the whys of what you do, nor should they, as long as you do.
"Mindset. How trendy a word. One that not only excuses the society that forms us and the culture that smashes us, but turns the entire blame for who we are or come to be, to ourselves. "
But Nora, the main character, has something (if not the only thing) clear in her mind: all her regrets, one by one, in chronological order, listed and organized. Regrets that are later presented to her in the form of a heavy book inside the Midnight Library, a place she ends up in while her life hangs in the balance, for the regrets became so powerful in her main life that she had decided to end it. And this book, this list, it got to me. And it did because, at first glance, her regrets made no sense to me. They had her in the core of them but they were about other people, and how she made them feel. An ex fiancé that badgered her to come back to him, she regretted having left him. The father who decided not to engage in a relationship with her after she decided to quit the swim team, the only thing he deemed to participate in his daughter's life, she regretted not continuing that activity. The band she had with her brother, the brother that no longer spoke to her and the friend that also resented her for leaving. She regretted not staying in the band so that maybe her brother would have a better relationship with her.
Do you see the pattern?
Even though she was a direct cause for all the activity to cease, none of the badness that came afterwards was her doing. The ex fiancé, as it turns out, was a complete tool, and she figures that out in less than an hour living a life with him. The father that decided not to have a relationship with his daughter because he now had nothing in common with her anymore was a terrible parent and should not had been allowed to cast influence on her or any other adolescent in existence. The brother, as it turned out, did not have a relationship with his sister because of his own problems in life, his own social inabilities, that so happened to be the same as his sister's which caused both to barely speak. Not because neither wanted to, but reaching out, to some people, is extremely difficult.
And it finally dawned on me. Matt Haig said it himself, but in a very vague way, the way a person that found what works for them would say something, but without any real idea of how it would work for the collective. "We just need a shift in perspective to change our situation, not just in terms of the physicality of it in jobs or relationships – some of those things are beyond our control – but in terms of mindset". This is a direct quote from him in his essay for Harper's Bazaar.
Mindset. How trendy a word. One that not only excuses the society that forms us and the culture that smashes us, but turns the entire blame for who we are or come to be, to ourselves.
I have seen friends and family regret things they had absolutely no power over. Regrets about not following this or that career when, in retrospect, they had neither the personality or mental health to embrace it nor the funds. But somehow, they ended up blaming themselves. 'If I only endured it a bit longer, if I had just pushed myself a bit further'. Yeah, to the point of breaking, that's what our society expects of us. And what about regrets that are pressed upon us, either by said society or family expectations? The idea we have to have it all figured out by the age of 18 or twenty something, because we need to start producing in the middle of our most hormonal and deranged years. Or even the marriage and kids expectations, imprinted mostly in woman, which leads to dozens of tales of couples who push themselves to their limits to be able to conceive.
And in that sense, of carrying other people's problems and wrapping ourselves in regret for them, or the false belief that we could have done things we had no chance in succeeding on, is that (and excuse me Matt Haig, I know you probably won't understand what I'm about to say) The Midnight Library can be easily translated into a very real thing called therapy. More specifically, psychoanalysis, something I know brings a chill to American mental health ideals, since it promotes profound self knowledge and no medication (pharmaceutical companies, I'm looking at you).
The world we in particular, live, is a world where our middle class dreams are set for failure. I won't even mention people below this social economic mark. To them, dreams are something not allowed, discouraged even. But to us, we are sold the idea that if we only work hard enough, we'll get there. And where is there? A place Matt Haig himself talks about in his essay, a place of fame, riches and glory. A place so far beyond our reach it seems rather impossible that we would actually believe we could achieve it. But we do, because everything around us today, the media, in specific social media, who put us in close contact with those who actually do have it all (I'm talking Bezos, not Kardashian), make us believe we can. After all, anxious people filled with regrets are a target market for thousands of products. And the lack of critical thinking in our society, which is purposefully not encouraged in school (thinkers are bad buyers) increases this hoard of 'lost in their own neuroses' people.
"But again, we can only reach that what is actually ours. And only with a whole lot of help, to live what the world doesn't really want us to. Our best lives."
In today's society, therapy should be free and available to all. How else would we separate regret from inability to? How else would we detach our desires from other's? And most importantly, how else would we understand that some of the things we regret or wished we would had pursued are just plain unobtainable, so we can start seeing reality for what it really is and maybe work out some goals and dreams that can actually come true? It is the only thing that can lift the vail of an idealized reality we sometimes create for ourselves, be it from our own doing or external forces, so we can see how things and us truly are. It is better to see our world for what it truly is than to spend our entire lives hoping in frustration that it will be anything else.
In the end, Nora decided to return to her "core life", the one that, as it faded, created The Midnight Library". The idea here, I guess, is that all the options that Nora could only reach in the library were actually available to her here, in the real world. And I think I agree. She, as well as us, can reach all of what is us and make something of it. But again, we can only reach that what is actually ours. And only with a whole lot of help, to live what the world doesn't really want us to. Our best lives.
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