May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and it felt like the right time to share something a little more personal. This is about a book, but it’s really about what it means to find something that meets you exactly where you are. I hope it lands for someone who needs it…

There are books you enjoy, and then there are books that arrive at exactly the right moment and quietly save you. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is the second kind.

I read it during one of the hardest stretches of my life. I won’t unpack all of it here, but I’ll say this: it was the kind of season where getting through a single day felt like an achievement. Where the future felt less like a horizon and more like a wall. I was lost in a way I hadn’t been before, and I wasn’t sure how to find my way back.

Then I met Nora Seed.

If you haven’t read the book, here’s what you need to know: Nora finds herself in a library that exists between life and death, a place where every book on the shelf represents a different version of her life. Every choice she didn’t make. Every road she didn’t take. And she gets to try them.

The premise sounds fantastical, and it is. But what it’s really about is something completely human: the weight we carry when we believe our best life is the one we didn’t choose.

The scene that broke me open, and then slowly put me back together, is Nora’s conversations with Mrs. Elm, the librarian who guides her through this impossible place. Mrs. Elm is warm and steady and doesn’t flinch from Nora’s pain. She also doesn’t let Nora off the hook. She keeps asking, gently but persistently: what would make your life feel worth living?

Not what you should have done differently. Not to look at all you’ve lost. But: what could still be possible?

That question landed somewhere deep in me.

I had spent so much energy cataloging my own version of despair. Replaying decisions. Wondering how things might have gone if I’d chosen differently. And somewhere in all of that, I had stopped asking the question that actually mattered, the one Mrs. Elm keeps nudging Nora toward. Not what did I miss, but what do I still have the chance to do?

That’s the quiet revolution at the heart of this book. It’s not about toxic positivity or pretending the hard things didn’t happen. Haig doesn’t flinch from Nora’s darkness; he sits in it with her. But he also refuses to let that darkness be the whole story. He makes the case, page by page and life by life, that the story isn’t over. That it’s genuinely, stubbornly not too late.

I needed someone to make that case for me. And for a while, that someone was a fictional librarian in a library between worlds.

I came out of that season changed, not because everything got fixed, but because something shifted in how I was holding it. I started asking different questions. I stopped treating my life like evidence of failure and started treating it like something still in progress. That’s not a small thing. That reframe, for me, was everything.

What makes this book hit even harder when you know Matt Haig’s story: he wrote it from the inside. At 24, he experienced a mental breakdown so severe that he nearly didn’t survive. He wrote about it unflinchingly in Reasons to Stay Alive, not to perform vulnerability, but because he believed, as he’s said many times, that honesty about darkness is one of the most useful things a person can offer another. He didn’t write The Midnight Library from a place of having everything figured out. He wrote it as someone who had also been in the dark, and found his way through, and wanted to hold a light for whoever needed it next.

That matters to me. It’s easy to take hope from someone who never had reason to lose it. It’s a different thing entirely to take it from someone who did.

The Midnight Library won’t fix what’s broken. But if you’re in a season where the weight of what-ifs feels heavier than what-is, it might do what it did for me: remind you that the life you’re still living is the one with the most possibility left in it.

Pick it up. Sit with Nora for a while. Let Mrs. Elm ask you the question, too.

You might be surprised by the answer that comes.