I’m reading The Midnight Library at the moment which is about depression and parallel worlds, two things my brain spends a lot of time occupied with. It’s about a woman who becomes able to live lots of parallel lives, and who learns about how to live her not-parallel one along the way.
It’s been a helpful book for me, but in a kind of weird way. The Midnight Library is very much about depression that focuses on the self. You worry you should have become a rock star or trained for the Olympics, but if you get the chance to experience the reality of these things they are unsatisfying in a way your dreams are not, as they are still human lives.
But what struck me is that the worlds the main character’s other selves inhabit are still not so different to our own— there don’t seem to be any where London has been destroyed or Taiwan has been nuked or anything like that. The human world remains solid, whatever occurs to individual humans. And it occurred to me that the root of my own depression is perhaps that I don’t believe this is true— that I think the world is chaotic and dangerous in a way that this book isn’t. This book says that the multiverse is safe, and so I am suspicious of it. But that does imply it’s not my sense of self which I’m struggling with? It’s only the awful possibilities of the world, this place where all our selves have to live, and which I find far scarier than the ones within the Library.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 