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Journalism of Courage
(Written by Manpreet Walia)
But why am I telling you this? Because sometimes, when life keeps handing you fragile things that keep slipping and breaking in your hands, a friend gathers the pieces, sets them aside, and places a book in your palms instead. One that teaches you how to hold yourself a little more gently.
This is a thank-you to that friend, the one who handed me What You’re Looking For Is in the Library by Japanese author Michiko Aoyama.
After the usual bout of bed rotting and treating myself to “little rewards” for having gone through so much, so early in life, I decided on Day 3 of being unemployed to take matters into my own hands. On the morning of January 18, 2025, after my husband left for the very place that had just let me go, I wrapped myself in a weather-and mood-appropriate Uniqlo fluffy fleece jacket, booked an auto, and set out to conquer the grand distance of 10 minutes all the way to Sunder Nursery.
I spent about twenty minutes wandering through the park, searching for the perfect tree. Think Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls. Unlike her, though, I found mine pretty quickly (20 minutes, no big deal). It was right there calling out to me. I spread out the sheets I had borrowed from my husband, and set up my little picnic under the tree. My fruit box sat on one side, my book, diary, and pen on the other.
Then I took out my phone because what is a solo picnic without some proof for Instagram? I told myself I would get the aesthetic shots out of the way before eating my fruits. Fifteen minutes later, I had four fabulous pictures ready to announce to the world that I was “living my best life” despite having no job.
Truthfully, I did not feel like I was. Not at first, at least. But in the next few hours, everything changed.
After putting my phone away and devouring my fruits, I finally opened my book. That next hour went by like my old job, here one moment, gone the next.. But unlike my job, this hour gave something back.
I knew this book would be about people trying to find what they had lost. I knew the library would somehow help them get there. And as one Reddit user described it “preachy, trite, overly simplistic, and heavy-handed.” I knew it would probably be all those things.
But I was so lost, and so ready to be found through other people’s stories, that I let the preachiness wash over me, hold me, caress me, care for me. Each story in What You’re Looking For Is in the Library felt like it had been waiting for me. Like Tomoka from Chapter 1, I suddenly felt 21 again. She was a sales assistant stuck in a routine job in Tokyo; I was stuck in a daze of “did that really just happen to me?”
Like Ryo from Chapter 2, a 35-year-old accountant who dreams of opening his own antiques shop but feels trapped in corporate monotony; wasn’t I feeling the same way? I wanted to write stories, yet somehow I had found comfort and normalcy in writing headlines for campaigns that never truly mattered to me.
When I reached Chapter 3, I truly felt held by the librarian, Sayuri Komachi. The story of Natsumi, a 40-year-old former magazine editor struggling with her identity after maternity leave and a demotion, hit a nerve I did not know was waiting to be touched. Now that I was married and deeply, madly wanting kids but still wanting to work, I found myself wondering: would something like this happen to me too? Was this the beginning of something I was not prepared for? How do you have it all, when women before you have barely managed to?
I did not think I would relate to Hiroya’s story in Chapter 4, a 30-year-old unemployed man living with his mother, adrift and resentful about his lack of direction, but I did. I was suddenly resentful too, about my lack of grasp on reality. Like the receding sunlight of the day, I was slowly surrendering to the darkness of having no direction in life.
And then, a few hours later, I met Masao in Chapter 5, a 65-year-old newly retired man who feels disconnected and purposeless after decades of professional identity. It was in his story that I finally met myself again.
I was Masao and everyone who came before him. I, too, had been suddenly pulled away from a routine that had become my north star: my colleagues, my friends, my daily to-do’s. Of course it was going to be a storm I had to weather. But if there is one thing the book taught me, it is that there is nothing life hands you that a little guidance or a librarian’s wisdom can not help you through.
Somewhere between the pages, I stopped feeling like a woman who had lost her job and started feeling like someone who had been given a pause. As I laid the book to rest in my lap, I was not thinking about résumés or rejections anymore. I was thinking about how life rearranges itself when you stop resisting. How libraries and sometimes life do not give you what you want to read, but exactly what you need to.
That morning at Sunder Nursery, I did not just read a book or post pictures for the ‘gram. I borrowed a little hope from its pages and this time, I am not planning to return it.
Don’t get me wrong, one book did not change my life. It did not magically hand me a new job or make adjusting to a new family any easier. What it did, though, was help me breathe again.
It reminded me that pauses are not punishments, they are invitations to look within. It still took me six months to find a job that felt right, one that finally did the job for me. But those months in between? They hurt like a heartbreak I didn’t want to end. And somewhere in that ache, I found comfort in knowing that no matter where life leaves me next, I will always have a library or a bookstore waiting, with pieces of myself tucked between its pages.
(The author is social media strategist)
