On Asking for Help

The goddess Hathor leading the Queen by the hand

First published on May 22, 2024

This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Bisan’s Hope

I hate to ask for help and yet how easily the woman sitting next to me on the plane asked me to hold her hand as we went through an especially rough patch of turbulence.

How brave to say “I am scared,” as the rest of us pretend otherwise.

Her husband, like the rest of us, had the strength equation back to front.

“She runs her own business and she’s used to traveling alone,” he said after she and I had unlaced our palms; she calmer, me still stunned by how easy it can be to ask for help. 

As if he owed me an explanation for her effortless vulnerability. 

As if I didn’t owe her an explanation for my inability to say “I, too, am scared.”

When both my arms were in a cast for three months after Egyptian riot police beat me and sexually assaulted me, I asked for help exactly just once, the day after the assault when the hotel employee who brought the food I’d ordered from room service arrived and I asked him to open the bottle of water for me because I could not untwist its cap. 

And if asking for help comes with a whispered “I, too, am scared,” I stood guard over myself every night, insomniac for weeks after, because I would not let myself be hurt again.

My mum says I befriend the rocks of the earth, an Arabic saying meaning that I easily and quickly befriend people. I have lots of friends. And yet I called on none of them to help me. I would shop for food with two grocery bags that I carried on either shoulder, just above my casts.

How strong for surviving what I did, everybody said! What a coward I was for lacking the courage to say “I need help.”

And then she asked me to hold her hand on a plane. 

Exhausted from long distance travel, my heart was effortlessly sliced open by her vulnerability. 

“Why can’t we do that?” it asked me.

“Shut up,” I replied. “My heart can’t handle this right now.”

We agreed, my heart and I, that holding that woman’s hand was a gift she gave to us and therefore ipso-facto-could-it-mean-it-must-mean (see how hard it is to admit it): am I depriving others from the gift of helping me?

Reach out and touch faith. Ask a stranger to hold your hand when you’re scared. Scare your heart into slicing open.

Less hyper independence, and more not wanting to be a burden, is my excuse for an inability to say “Will you hold my hand, I am scared.”

Methinks it’s the scared part. 

Who are you calling scared?

One woman’s burden is another’s fear making contact with the wonder that is connection. On my writing desk is a small framed papyrus of the goddess Hathor holding the hand of the queen and leading her to wonder.

Reach out and touch faith.

Ask a stranger to hold your hand when you’re scared. Scare your heart into slicing open.

My goal: that you are found by wonder.

My wish: that you intensely live.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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