Regret, Choices, Genuineness

This is not a book review of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, but the reflection of a novel that made me tear up on the train.
We all make choices in our daily lives. Choosing what to study after O-levels. Giving up your seat on the train for a small child. Whether to do a graduation program at a bank or work at a small startup. Holding the lift for your neighbors. Choosing to do a run or stay at home.
We are conditioned to think that our big actions that defines us. Where we went to school. What we do for a living. How much money we have in the bank.
As much as that is true, we are also defined by our smallest actions. How we appreciate the people around us. How we show empathy when it's difficult. How we can find a thousand valid excuses to avoid something difficult, but choose to do it anyway.
The Midnight Library is art. The story follows a Nora Seed who decides to end her own life after losing all meaning. The people that she felt connected to had left her. Her cat died. There's no one relying on her. No one would notice if she disappeared. She decides to take her own life.
She appears in a library. A library where she could open any book and live out a life where she did things differently. What if she took her talents with swimming and did it professionally. What if she pursued glacier research. What if she stayed in her rock band. The library could let her experience all these parallel lives, and she did.
There is a pivotal moment in the story where it all makes sense. Nora finally found the perfect life. She found a simple and gentle life where she has a loving husband, a curious child, a fulfilling job, money, freedom, stability. She took it all in. She was happy. Until she wasn't. Fragments of her root life showed up. The people from her original life that appreciated her existence turned out to have very different lives when the only variable was her existence in theirs. This was the turning point. The story was not about Nora all along. The story was about the impact she had on the people around her just by her being herself. She couldn't see it when she decided to take her own life, but she mattered to them, and they matter to her.
Treat people around you genuinely. You matter to them, whether you know it or not, whether they know it or not.
ChatGPT was only used to correct grammatical errors, otherwise no AI was used in the writing of this article.