Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

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  To Alex, who kept me going.

  To Ronan, may you have courage and kindness in spades.

  And to the people who have shared their lives with me—thank you.

  Introduction

  For the past five years, I’ve listened to strangers I’ve met on Craigslist tell me stories they’ve never told anyone before. I interviewed someone who went through gender-reassignment surgery and fell in love for the very first time, as his true self. I spoke with a man who lost his wife to alcoholism and struggled to rebuild his life without her. I cried when I listened to a veteran who lost both of his legs after serving two tours of combat abroad. I spoke to a woman who detailed her life as a former Jehovah’s Witness and to a Mormon faced with telling his family that he is gay.

  In these five years, I’ve heard stories about sexual abuse and mental illness, divorce and death, addiction and disability—stories that have left me in awe at the breadth and depth of humanity, at our ability to overcome and rebuild, forgive and move on, heal and give back. I’ve learned to listen, to bear witness to heartbreaking loss and regret, to provide a safe outlet for healing. In this climate, where diversity is simultaneously celebrated and used to monger fear, judgment, and separatism, I’ve learned above all else that pain, in its protean forms, can unite us as human beings—that each of us can be a light when someone’s day feels particularly dark.

  Before I started Craigslist Confessional, I worked as a lobbyist out of a tiny office in downtown Washington, DC. I stressed out over deadlines, client meetings, unanswered emails, and office politics. I purposefully distracted myself with daily minutiae so as not to let my unhappiness fully settle in. I’d always wanted to have a job where I helped people. But somewhere along the way, I got sidetracked. My work left me empty. Showing up every day to do something when my heart wasn’t in it felt like living in a perpetual existential crisis.

  Nothing made things more painful than being isolated, unable to share my feelings. I felt alienated, invisible, misunderstood, dismissed, and shut out. I was locked into a life of indentured servitude to my student loan provider. As an immigrant, I’d worked hard to finally win my American dream, only to find a mirage in its place—an experience very different from what I’d expected.

  But I didn’t feel entitled to complain. Each day on my way to work, I passed at least five homeless people and reminded myself: You have it good. You are employed. You are educated. You are healthy. You have so much more than most people. So I shamed myself into a disquiet silence.

  To convince others—especially my parents, who had sacrificed so much for my happiness and success—that everything was going perfectly well, I curated my life and presented only the happiest, most perfect parts of it for others to see. Social media filters and reality television fed me “real” versions of people I was meant to emulate—successful, attractive, healthy, and rich adults leading travel-filled and meaningful lives free of the drudgery of everydayness.

  More and more, the pressure to keep up appearances made me feel inadequate and lonely. The dissonance between my reality and the person I presented to the world was so jarring. I felt inherently dishonest. And, I often thought, if I couldn’t be honest with others, how could I be honest with myself? Had I gotten so warped, so sucked into playing the role of the perfect daughter, the perfect employee, the perfect girlfriend, that I could no longer tell my genuine life from the one I was projecting?

  One day, as I was walking back to work from Capitol Hill, I spotted Joe, a homeless man who panhandled in front of the office building. I could almost always count on seeing him standing in the same spot, day after day, shaking a paper cup and wearing a black tattered shirt. Whenever I could, I brought him boxed lunches that I’d pick up during Hill briefings and got him the occasional snack or drink. I had a particular soft spot for Joe because of a bitter memory from my first day of work. Two young security guards had been checking me in when one of them excused himself. He went outside to talk to Joe—I was only able to catch a few words from the exchange, but the gist was that the guards had received complaints from the building’s occupants about Joe’s panhandling and he should move along elsewhere. Joe nodded his head slowly, but he stood his ground as if to protest the unfairness.

  It broke my heart.

  “Are you upset with me?” Joe asked, wondering why I’d rounded the corner lunchless.

  The truth was that I was broke. My salary at the lobbying firm was laughable—law grads are a dime a dozen in DC, and we’re cheap and replaceable, especially at the entry level—and between student loans, rent, and food, I was struggling to make ends meet.

  Joe looked sad as I mumbled a half-hearted explanation. I blinked back tears and asked if it was all right to spend time with him and talk that day. I went around the corner and got a sandwich to share, and we sat next to each other. I asked him about how he’d become homeless. Did he have any family? Where did he stay when the weather was bad? Did he often go hungry? He answered my questions with intense detail, often stumbling over his words.

  Then he asked me about my job and my life. I surprised myself with what I shared—thoughts that had, until then, seemed so personal and devastating but paled in comparison to Joe’s everyday struggle. For the first time I was able to be refreshingly honest. I spoke without fear that he’d judge me or that the gossip would trickle down to friends, family, and coworkers. Neither of us had anything to gain from the other. Ours was an interaction born out of need. It felt, simply, like we were confessing.

  Joe listened patiently, seeming grateful to have someone to talk to. And as I watched him shake his cup of change at passersby while we talked, I understood why. Sometimes people shot him dirty looks. Sometimes they tossed him a handful of change, maybe a flickering look of judgment—or was it shame, fear, guilt?—but mostly people completely ignored him: no friendly smiles, no inquisitive glances. He was totally invisible.

  “Very few people,” he told me, “treat me like I’m a human being.”

  That’s when Craigslist Confessional was born. It is a project about hearing and seeing what others don’t—about pulling back the curtain that separates our secretive inner lives from our perfectly curated outer lives. My “job” is to listen when no one else will. I do it for free—and completely anonymously.

  Inspired by my talk with Joe, I posted an ad in the Craigslist personals section. “Tell me about yourself,” the subject line read.

  I’m not certain what I hoped to accomplish with the ad. The truth is that I didn’t have a grand plan. Yes, I wanted to put something good out in the world. I wanted to help people by listening to them—by giving them a place to be themselves. But if I’m honest, I also wanted to be heard and seen, too. I wanted to not feel alone. I wanted to connect with people beyond the superficial—I wanted our common struggle to unite us in a way that felt real. So posting the ad was an ill-thought-out attempt at trying to replicate that connection with Joe, and I really didn’t think much would come of it.

  But I was so very wrong. Over the next few days, the responses came in nonstop. And what was more surprising was the fact that the ad seemed to have hit a nerve, because people were very willing to go out on a limb with me—to meet me over coffee and to talk.

  My fi
rst meeting was at a Starbucks right across the street from work. I sat there for a half hour, nervously picking at my nail polish and becoming more convinced by the minute that the woman who’d emailed me wouldn’t show. Then I saw someone walking hurriedly across the street, looking just as anxious as I felt, and my heart jumped—Oh my God, she actually came.

  We made small talk as we waited in line to get two iced drinks, and then we walked to a nearby park, where she told me about her two-decades-long struggle with heroin addiction and the toll it had taken on her life, marriage, and children. It was surreal. I kept expecting to see all that she’d gone through written somewhere on her body. But physically she betrayed nothing. Her scarred arms were carefully hidden under long sleeves. Her nails were manicured; her hair perfectly coiffed.

  At the end of our meeting, I offered to walk her to her Metro stop. She pointed out street corners where she’d scored smack many moons ago. Mostly, though, we were both quiet. I felt very emotional. I didn’t know how to express to her how much it meant that she’d trusted me with her story. I didn’t know how to explain that it would be safe with me. And so I hugged her, and then she got on the escalator and the underground started slowly erasing her—and she looked back at me and waved. And that was the last time I saw her.

  When I got home that day, I responded to more emails—and then I kept going. I met people in person or spoke to them over the phone about anything they wanted to share. For many, it was the first time they’d been able to recount their stories without fear of stigma or ostracism.

  “I’ve never said any of this out loud,” people said, or “I haven’t even told my therapist [or best friend, or family, or partner] about this.”

  Although it felt amazing to be able to do something for other people, ironing out the “interview” process was bumpy. Some things I got right from the start—others, very wrong. For one, I had no way of recognizing the people I was meeting. Henry, one of the first people I met with, sat next to me at a Starbucks for about twenty minutes before I realized he was the person who had responded to the ad. For a while, I started bringing a gray floppy hat to meetings with me so that I would be easy to pick out.

  But that ease of recognition was also potentially scary. It’s Craigslist, after all. Every person I told about what I was doing would invariably bring up the movie The Craigslist Killer. So it got me thinking that maybe I was putting a target on my back. I abandoned the hat in favor of having the subject describe what he/she was going to wear to the meeting. But I kept the coffee shop locale because it was public, familiar, and therefore it felt safe. For the first couple of months, Alex, my now husband, insisted on shadowing me to as many of my weekend meetings as he could. He would sit in the opposite corner of the shop and read a book, all the while keeping an eye out for me.

  I didn’t bring a notebook to the first few meetings because my aim hadn’t been to write down these stories. I mostly listened, but the process was much more like a conversation. After each talk, I would get home and feel emotionally heavy, so I journaled about the experience to unburden myself. I noticed after several rounds of repeating this pattern—listen, get home, write to unburden—that it was cathartic for me to write about what I’d heard. It gave me distance from the experience, and clarity. I also often went back to read what I’d written. It felt like the stories had ripened over the time left unread, and they brought a new dimension to my understanding of what had been shared. I was realizing the value of putting these stories down on paper, and the aim of the project slowly unveiled itself: I wanted these stories to find a home, a kindred spirit who needed them. What if, by sharing the stories I heard, I could help other people going through something similar? What if the stories helped someone feel less lonely, or get a better understanding of a taboo topic, or spot someone in crisis? What if I could use my position—my luck in being someone privy to these outstanding stories—to pay it forward?

  I amended my original Craigslist ad to include a plan: I wanted to write these stories down and hopefully, some day, publish them. I reached back out to a couple of the first subjects, whom I’d met before I started writing, and got their permission to write about their stories, too. I started bringing a notebook to my meetings and taking notes. Regardless of the newfound purpose, the project was always, first and foremost, about listening—about creating space for others to share fearlessly, without reservation. Whether they wanted their stories to be written was up to them, and I always provided the option to just meet and talk, no notebook—off the record, so to speak.

  Still, I feared that the note-taking, the prospect of having their stories published, might quash potential subjects’ ability to be totally open. So I took many precautions to ensure total anonymity, and the venue—Craigslist—really helped. No real names. Scrambled email addresses. The subjects could share as little or as much as they wanted—they could test out their comfort level and boundaries without feeling like they had something on the line, like they might be exposed. To further ensure that they remained anonymous, I changed their names and, only where absolutely necessary and requested by the subject, other small details that might give their identity away—making sure, of course, that the change didn’t affect any germane aspects of their story. Finally, I always gave the subject the option of requesting that I leave out information they felt might give away their identity.

  Some of the precautions I took, over time, began to feel unnecessary. Although I continued to change names and otherwise protect anonymity, I found that people were willing to be open, to share their stories, in hopes that they might be some solace for someone in need. And I discovered, too, that people needed to talk. Not to converse, not to get advice, not to have clever repartee. They needed to get things off their chests. Truly, to vent. So the interviews went from a conversational style in the very beginning to very one-sided—about 95 percent them, 5 percent me. I listened. I asked occasional questions, mostly to clarify details. Maybe I asked a leading question or two (I am trained in law, after all), just to get to the heart of something. But for the most part, I wanted to create the impression that I was not there at all—that the person was talking to him- or herself, out loud. Even thoughts are transformed, filtered, when they’re thought for an audience. I wanted very little of that filter, so I practiced listening. Just listening. Not thinking about how I was going to respond. Not interjecting. Not creating any sort of personal or emotional reaction to something shared—this was very hard—but just being present.

  I don’t think these meetings were a cure-all for my subjects. I hoped that they would be therapeutic but not like therapy. Therapy, for myriad reasons, just isn’t available or an option for many people, so I did what I could to provide a listening ear, instead—to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When more was asked of me—more direction, more help—I put my subjects in touch with people who have the training to provide what they needed. I became comfortable in admitting when I was out of my depth, and I found that my lack of formal training was a plus—it allowed me to keep an open mind and an unprimed perspective. Ultimately, people were happy to have the opportunity to help others by telling their stories—we shared a vision in which each story would find a second self.

  At the beginning of every conversation, I asked permission to take handwritten notes. When something struck me as very singularly and perfectly expressed, I took down direct quotes. Whenever possible, I also tried to stay true to the person’s manner of speaking. The meetings themselves were very loosely structured—I’d introduce myself, give a quick recap of the project, ask for permission to write their stories, and then give the subjects a chance to ask questions. Then, I told them to “jump in wherever you feel comfortable.” I noticed that asking people to tell me their stories gently nudged them into a different, somewhat more removed perspective into their own lives. The process of creating their own narrative gave them distance, but it also forced them to come up with a beginning, middle, and end—and that was the most be
neficial aspect of this exercise.

  The meetings are long—average meetings are about one and a half to two and a half hours, but my longest was eight hours!—and the flow of the interview was generally stream of consciousness (again, I was trying to create a safe and comfortable environment that made the subjects feel as if they’d granted me permission to listen in to their thoughts). The act of the subject’s having to tell his or her story, however, gave the conversation structure, and it necessitated the need for an ending—so it got every person thinking, How does my story end? How do I make the most of what has happened to me?

  After every conversation, I gave myself a maximum of one week from the date shared to write up the story. I wanted everything to be fresh in my memory so that the resulting story could be as faithful and accurate as possible. On a few occasions, I missed my self-imposed deadline. I found that I needed distance from some stories, that I quite simply couldn’t bring myself to write them up. Some of them hit very close to home, so revisiting them was difficult. In some other cases—for example, the story of a father who admitted to sexually molesting his daughters when they were young girls, after their mother died from cancer—I found it impossible to suspend judgment, to be impartial, to write clearly. Other stories—ones about random misfortunes and senseless tragedies—those types of stories scared me.

  But because I had found work that meant so much to me, I was eager to do it all the time. Every spare moment. When I took time to myself, I felt selfish. Perhaps the hardest lesson I had to learn throughout these past five years is that, in doing work like this, it was more important than ever to establish and honor my own boundaries, and to take care of my own mental health first. It very quickly became too much, and it started taking a toll. It somehow hadn’t occurred to me that I would take all these stories so very personally, that I would feel so personally invested, personally wronged, personally hurt by what had happened to other people. I often felt overwhelmed and unable to see a silver lining—when you hear primarily about tragedy, sadness, injustice, and heartbreak every single day, it’s easy to lose sight of what is good in the world. But when I began to lose faith in the project (How can this make a difference when bad things happen to people every single day?), or started to feel foolish and idealistic, I’d go to another meeting and, without fail, I was reminded that this was necessary—it was a service people needed, and I was lucky enough to be the one in a position to offer it.