Journalism Taught Me to Ask for Help

I was in Portugal before the pandemic began. I speak no Portuguese beyond the smattering of a phrasebook and had a few interviews lined up for a (now-axed) travel story I was working on. While in Lisbon on my last day, it struck me that a glove shop that I had passed by tens of times would make a great addition to my story. I called, emailed, begging for an interview. The hotel concierge even obliged with a translation on my behalf—but nothing. Three tourism-board calls later, I finally had an interview with the owner the evening before I flew home.

Carlos Carvalho, the owner of the shop, was exceptionally polite. Over the hour I was there, I saw him interact with customers with the sort of sincere ease that is practiced with time. Carvalho’s shop, a hole-in-the-wall in downtown Lisbon, nearly a century old, is a historic landmark in the city. They still did things old-school: handmade gloves sized in quarterly increments in a variety of colors. They were fitted with the help of an attendant. As the customer rested their elbow on a cushion on the four-foot-long shop counter, the attendant—when I was there, Carvalho—would yank and pull the glove fingers into place.

Something happens when a glove fits. The attendant has a look that says, “I told you so,” while the customer—the glove wearer—feels the fit. Their expressions mirror each other. There is trust and satisfaction. Then, the customer takes off the glove to try another and they start again.

I hate people and I hate asking people for things. Of these things, specifically, I hate asking people for help. I’ve spent a good portion of my near-thirty years avoiding it whenever possible. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to turn down help that’s been offered to me.

And the act of wearing a glove that a stranger—even a paid one—has fitted onto my hand is terrifying. The help there is mandatory.

I’ll save you time as far as the psychoanalysis goes: I have PTSD. My trauma’s made me someone who can be hard to the world with what my therapist calls “unrelenting standards.” I know that asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness—as long as I’m not the one asking for help.

Since shifting my career into journalism three years ago, I’ve found myself at odds with the uber-independent, tough-exteriored woman I thought I was. I’ve had to ask people—swarms of them—for help:

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Can you explain this to me? I just don’t get it, and I don’t think readers will either.”

“Would you be open to commenting on this very complicated subject I cannot wrap my last brain cell around?”

I imagine this isn’t a huge deal for most people. Perhaps “normal” people pick up their phones without talking points or a mentally prerehearsed conversation when it comes to asking for help. Perhaps they see asking for a favor as a given, an exchange that inevitably happens in a friendship or a business relationship. But for me, it’s no small feat.

Writing is a remarkable exercise in vulnerability and persistence. First, we struggle to put visceral words on paper or a screen. Then we hope, on some level, someone will see us. Feel us. Understand us. Of course, the act of writing itself is a solitary activity, but the end goal is what I think keeps us fueled; the breadcrumbs of possibility that someone will get us. But even after we finish a piece of writing, there are no shows to crowdsurf in, no standing ovations to tell us that our words connected with our readers.

What we put out versus what we consume of the response to our art is largely one-sided. We are expected to stay home and bleed words onto the page while we battle depression, no one there other than the empty gin bottles at our feet. (Or so the myth of the “great” writer goes.)

Writing is a remarkable exercise in vulnerability and persistence.

Don’t get me wrong, this first step is important: moving past “Can I even write?” into the secret hope that makes us finish drafts in the first place. But we can’t stay in that place too long.

Where our art gets more vulnerable—and hopefully “better”—is where we go beyond that step, where we share scribbles and ideas with friends who encourage us to take that idea we’d have crumpled up before it reached the realm of reality.

As a journalist, I’ve learned that isolation is damning—something I don’t think the writer in me fully recognizes.

As a journalist, I know I can’t be an expert in everything I report on. I can’t be my own sensitivity reader or my own source. I need, despite my reservations, to make phone calls, write emails, social-media stalk.

Moreover, as a freelancer, I pitch people and publications when ideas strike. Sometimes editors say yes. More often than not, they pass or say nothing at all. When I care about a story—about, say, evictions of indigenous people from a national park in the name of colonizer conservation—those rejections feel personal. And yet, I’m able to take a deep breath and try, try again.

I’d always tried to compartmentalize the writer me from the journalist me (and before that, from the copywriter me)—terrified that the writing styles would mix in the manner that the brightest of paints do in a primary school art class, leaving behind shades of muddy brown. It never occurred to me that both sides might benefit from the other.

Perhaps this lightbulb moment of mine is obvious, that the skills and discipline I learn in one area of my life seep into another.

“Asking” inevitably implies needing help and being vulnerable, just as writing does, whether we’re career authors or online writers trying to get a point across. Even writing to entertain demands vulnerability. Will the joke land? Will the copy click? Will the reader finish the whodunit and say, “What a giant waste of time”?

We don’t know any of this. That’s the whole point of being vulnerable; it’s a gamble. If we know know, there’s no real vulnerability involved. Consequently, we end up writing what’s safe and predictable. It shows. For me, this is when I write for the money as opposed to what I want to in the wee hours of the morning, when I’m convinced the muses smile above my head.

Asking for help in journalism is straightforward: a transaction that starts with “Can you . . . ?” and ends with “Thanks,” or, “That’s fine, thanks all the same.” In writing, asking for help is similar to prayer. Sometimes we ask it of ourselves, of the invisible Genius we hope hovers over us, or of the friend or lover we entrust with our first draft.

The gloves in Carvalho’s shop are snug enough they mold to your hands. The leather is lined with silk, cashmere, or wool, and it traces your fingers until it is undoubtedly yours. Once you leave the glove shop, the gloves are yours to wear. When you put them on for the first time, consider letting someone help you—even if you think you can do it just fine by yourself.

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