Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  In the way that some of my friends speak about their lives, I can tell that they take certain things for granted—nice childhood homes, a family who loves them, and a place to turn to when things go south. It confuses me because I look just like them, but I feel so different. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard the word unconditional associated with parents. For me, it’s so far from the truth. My friends think that my refusal to ask for help is noble, is principled. They don’t get that not all parents are the same.

  I talk to my mom every once in a while, whenever I’m feeling brave enough to confront some real issues. Like, for example, why she harbored an emotionally abusive man in our house for so long. My stepfather crushed whatever was left of my self-esteem, and for the longest time I couldn’t talk about my feelings. He mocked me, so I clowned around—made jokes, deflected questions, acted tough. Even so many years later, I’m still not ready to let anyone in, to let them see the mess.

  I read somewhere that the number one predictor of a woman’s earning capacity is her father’s income and occupation. If I take that at face value, then no matter what I do, my childhood has conditioned me for a life lived in poverty. I know many people think that getting an education and finding a good, steady job can change that—but these opportunities are not within arm’s reach for all Americans. The idea of putting myself into student loan debt and forgoing several years’ worth of a salary only to hopefully get a better job in this market is not all too appealing.

  But I don’t say this to most people. There’s so much criticism directed at millennials nowadays that any whisper of a complaint draws out mass accusations of entitlement—even where it doesn’t exist. The preferred narrative is all about the bootstraps stories, the easy tales of people who struggled but then they just pulled themselves together and made it. Just like that.

  And that’s a pretty story to tell, sure. But it’s also dangerous and misleading. For every one of them, there are hundreds of me—people who have seen just how far you can fall, who have experienced what it’s like to go to sleep hungry, and who have nowhere to turn to for help but inward. I’ve been on the verge of homelessness, on the verge of hunger, and on the verge of unemployment. On any given day, my life has as much of a chance of being a bootstrap narrative as it does of being a cautionary tale.

  These days, most of my peers come from affluent or middle-class homes. Through no fault of their own, they project their reality onto mine. They assume that I grew up similarly, had similar luxuries and toys, and lived a childhood that mirrors theirs. A while back, I was in the kitchen with my roommate and she was using this fancy apple-slicing contraption. I asked her about it, and she said something to the effect of “they sold these in infomercials back in the day; everyone had one of these,” and all I could think was that we barely even had apples. She called me a simpleton.

  I often tell myself that my upbringing built character and that I’m better for it. I’m more empathetic, well-rounded, understanding, approachable, strong. Some days, that doesn’t ring true. Some days, I want my life to have been simple. I want everything to have come easily, and why not? What’s so wrong with an easy life? I don’t want to begrudge my friends their luck, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I want to get in the shower and scrub away my past from my skin, get myself unstuck from my thoughts, let all the bad slide off. Sometimes I feel like if I scrub hard enough, if I change things around just so, I’ll get to the girl who everyone sees.

  You know, in most chick flicks I’ve ever watched, there’s that character of the girl who has it all—perfect husband, perfect job, perfect style, perfect hair. At some point in the course of the movie, that character ends up breaking down and showing that things aren’t so perfect in her life, after all. Well, I think that’s a BS plot device. Some people do have it all. I see them every day in their designer shoes, having lunch with their pretty friends, posting up photos of their summer adventures. And I struggle with my prejudice against them. But maybe they’re just showing me what I want to see, too.

  I wish there was a label you could wear that told people everything they needed to know about you. I feel like it would make people so much kinder to one another—to know of people’s troubles and burdens, and be more considerate of them. Mine would say—Maddy: good person, hard worker, grew up poor. Trying her best.

  Marc, fifty-one

  This is hard to talk about because I grew up in a very conservative Christian environment. Currently, I work for a Christian organization where my morality and status as an upstanding citizen is probably the most important factor in my continued employment.

  My first encounter with my sexuality was when I was eleven or twelve. I found a stash of Playboy magazines out in the woods behind my house. I brought one copy back and hid it under my bed. I was fascinated by it, but initially it was asexual. Once I figured out what I could do, though, I began to develop an unhealthy obsession with the female form. There was one woman in particular, her name was Candy Loving, who was very well endowed. She had a 34D bra size, and that size, specifically, is a trigger for me—that’s what I’m attracted to. I would masturbate to the magazine one or two times a day.

  In college, things were pretty normal. I met Ali during my senior year of school, and she also had a 34D chest. She was very conservative and uncomfortable with her sexuality, but I started to encourage her to show off her body more. I would pick out her outfits for her, and she was getting a lot of attention from guys. Men would look at her—it was obvious that she was having an effect. She would tell me how it made her feel, and we kind of continued the “conversation” back home. It turned her on, getting attention from other men. We got married and went on our honeymoon to Hawaii. Before the honeymoon, we went bikini shopping together.

  We’d been married for a couple of years when she told me that this guy at work was hitting on her. With my permission, she went out with him and eventually they had sex. She came home and told me about it and compared him to me. It was exciting, being compared and feeling, sometimes, humiliated or not good enough—it turned me on. She was out on another date with him, and I was at home, thinking about what they might be saying and doing, and I got really turned on. I started playing around with her underwear and her bra. And then I tried them on. She came home and found me with her things on, and she was very critical. She thought it was not all right. Well, that was the beginning of the end with Ali. After things ended with us, she started dating—in the traditional sense—the guy at work. They’re married now, and they have a big, beautiful family.

  When I was going through the divorce with Ali, I went out and bought a bunch of magazines and was masturbating in my car during the day. A woman walked by and saw me, and I got arrested for indecent exposure even though I was minding my business in my car, and I didn’t expose myself knowingly. I got a probation before judgment—so two years of probation, and if it didn’t happen again, it would be expunged from my record. I wanted to get away from the East Coast, away from the divorce and the mess I’d made for myself legally, so I decided to move out to California.

  During this same time, email and the internet became more available. I started using the internet for porn, and it began to feed my addiction and my fantasies. I also started to pay for phone sex. I went to hotels that were frequented by prostitutes in order to act out my fantasies. Every last dime I made was going toward fulfilling my sexual desires. During a binge, I’d go to multiple prostitutes and strip clubs two or three times a day. In one day, I could easily spend my entire paycheck and anything I might have managed to save during a few days that I’d tried to restrain myself. Thousands of dollars—poof.

  In California, I had a stroke of bad luck. Someone I knew through Ali came to one of my work events. She knew about my kinks, brought them to my boss, and I got fired. I decided to move back east and started working for my alma mater.

  These were two of the best years of my life. I’d started getting some counseling and going to Sex Addicts A
nonymous. Plus, there wasn’t much happening in my small town in terms of strip clubs and other temptations. But the internet was still a problem, so I began to compartmentalize in order to gain some more self-control. I’d only release on certain days, and I had a maximum spending limit. It didn’t always work, but things seemed better. I met a girl, we got engaged, and I had the opportunity to move to a big city for a dream job. Obviously, along with the big-city paycheck came the big-city temptations.

  There was an adult bookstore on the side of the road just outside the city. I was out there for business, and I was driving back home when I saw it for the first time. I made a U-turn and sat in the parking lot for about ten, fifteen minutes. But I went in. All the feelings and temptations cropped back up out of their neat little compartments. In the back of the store, there was an “arcade” area—very dark, private, and with curtains. There were lots of men back there, strolling around. I went into one of the booths and started masturbating. The booths had holes in the walls, glory holes—these are mostly for gay men, and they’re very illegal. These places get raided all the time. I was too scared to do anything, so I just finished and ran out.

  I started to engage in increasingly risky behavior after that. In my experience, sexual fantasies are progressive. You get a high, the dopamine levels spike, but then there’s only so many times you can look at and experience the same thing before you want to take it up a notch. It happens little by little. For example, I never had the obsession with bras and panties growing up. That really came out, full blast, when I was in the cuckold marriage.

  Looking for the next thing, I started calling phone-sex services again and one night I got hold of this woman. I told her about my obsession with women’s lingerie, and she started telling me that I’m not much of a man. She was emasculating me, and it really got me off. I called her several times in the span of a few weeks, and she progressively got in my head about telling my fiancée about what I was up to. She wasn’t doing it out of concern, of course—it was just another sexual ploy. She asked for my phone number. The first few times, I didn’t give it to her. I gave her a fake number. It was like Samson and Delilah—why would I give in to this woman’s seduction and give her so much power over me?

  But eventually, in a moment of weakness, I gave in and gave her my real number. She called my fiancée and told her, and I was in the house at the time with my fiancée, watching her reaction. I know that it was a whacked-out, really terrible thing to do, but I was turned on. So I guess that’s where my self-destruction fetish flourished, and I think that, later on, it grew into enjoying being financially blackmailed. Needless to say, my fiancée broke off the engagement.

  I kept a low profile for a couple of months and eventually started dating again. I met this girl, got married, and we moved in together. I kept everything a secret from her, but I started wearing a bra and panties underneath my work clothes, and I started going back to that roadside bookstore. One night, after work, I went into one of the booths and some guy stuck his penis through the hole. I reached out and touched it, and I kept telling myself—You’re a girl, you can do this—so I put him in my mouth and sucked him off for a while, until I came. The guilt I felt when I came really overwhelmed me, so I went around the side of the building and threw up. But the draw of the booth was always there, in the back of my mind. I went back a few weeks later. This guy knocks on the door, and I let him in. He tells me that I look pretty, and to “be a good girl.” Those phrases are triggers for me. I gave him a blow job, and he finished on my face and immediately left. I sat there and masturbated, and the second I came I was overwhelmed by shame and self-hate.

  This whole time, I’m working for this Christian organization and I have a job where everyone thinks I’m devout, on the straight and narrow. Meanwhile, I’m spending all my money and time just figuring out what perverse thing I’ll get up to next.

  I was being so reckless, and I felt guilty because of my wife, too. I had stopped having sex with her when I became sexually active with men. She kept asking me what was the matter—and one night, I told her some selective parts, mostly just about the cross-dressing kink. So. That’s two divorces, if you’re counting, and one broken-off engagement.

  Since the small-town life had been good to me before, I fled my problems again and found a quaint little place in the South. They still have internet and phones in the South, though. I’d call in and tell the women who I really was, where I really worked, and that whole thing—the power dynamic, the threat of being outed—became my next fantasy. I got back in touch with my ex-fiancée. The relationship became sexual again, and she started recording all our conversations and keeping screenshots. She asked me to send her photos of myself with bra and panties on, and she started to blackmail me by threatening to put them on xHamster, this online porn website. I eventually told her that I wanted it to end and that I could no longer afford to pay her.

  Weeks later, I got called in to work and they had a folder filled with photos of me—the ones I’d sent to my ex. Apparently, she had tipped them off. I tried to explain that I was being blackmailed, but nobody seemed very interested in my sob story, and who can blame them? I drove down to the road to a random strip mall parking lot and started masturbating. I had this explosive orgasm, thinking about what had happened—about actually being exposed.

  * * *

  I contacted a lawyer who sealed the record, and I went away quietly. I got another job, moved yet again, and checked myself into an inpatient sexual-addiction clinic. They taught me some strategies that have helped—for instance, I went back to the practice of compartmentalizing, and I try to stick to a budget. It’s not about being perfect but about coping with my issue the best I can.

  I reconnected with my high school sweetheart in the meantime, and we got married. So here I am. Fifty-one. Married three times. No children of my own, and maybe that’s for the best.

  I just don’t want to be anything like my own dad. I remember when I was five years old, I was naked in the shower with my father and he was explaining his body parts to me. I don’t remember if he had an erection, but I do remember that he wanted to have a “shower lesson” again, and I felt very uncomfortable about that. When I was about nine or ten, he started to come into my room before sleep to tickle my back. One time, he went below my waistband, and I felt his hand on the crack of my rear end. I turned around and I said, “What are you doing? What are you—gay?” He was stunned and taken aback, and he said no and left. And then, when I was fifteen years old, he came out as gay and divorced my mother. He’s been with the same guy for thirty-plus years. So it seems that the sins of my father have been uniquely passed on to me: he was arrested in the seventies for public masturbation, too. Ultimately, I don’t walk around in my “normal” life attracted to men, but sometimes I think that’s what’s kept me from openly exploring my sexuality—the hatred that I have for my dad.

  This past month, I paid $300 for a transformation. This woman came to my hotel room, shaved my legs, did my makeup, and put a wig on me. She took photos of me in my lingerie, and she told me to leave the hotel as my alter ego, Julia. It was so thrilling, liberating. My wife was out of town, so I walked up to my condo as Julia, as well. I walked around our home and imagined what it would be like to live in this skin forever. But I know, eventually, I have to go back to real life—and real life is a constant state of suspense.

  Any time that I’m at work and I get a call from my boss, I get gripped by fear. This is it, I think. They’ve found out again. But just as soon as that fear settles in, it’s supplanted by arousal and excitement. Maybe getting found out is a chance to start over again, to start fresh. And that’s not so bad.

  Linda, fifties

  I met him at work. I was twenty-three and he was thirty-two. We grew up in the same state, and we had the same interests. Things were good, so we got married. I picked someone who I thought could take care of me. I assumed that every husband would be like my father—honest, judicious, a good fa
mily man.

  We had a good life—my husband was always so label- and image-conscious, very generous and extravagant with gifts. I remember when we first started dating, we played this game—let’s tell each other a flaw about ourselves.

  I said, “I have a tendency to gain weight.”

  And without missing a beat, he said, “How much?”

  I guess I also had some peach fuzz back in the day, and he took to calling me Groucho Marx. He was that kind of guy.

  My husband owned his own business, and he provided well. I was a housewife throughout our seventeen-year marriage. I was very focused on our girls and being a good mom to them. We lived in a 1.3-million-dollar home. I’d start the day with nine holes or some tennis and then sit by the pool. I was happy to be able to stay home with my girls, but I always kept my connection to work and the outside world. I always had something on the side, I guess because I felt that things might fall apart. I’m Henny Penny secretly, but I’m a practicing optimist.

  One day, out of the blue—to me, at least—the IRS came knocking. We were behind on our corporate taxes. Then 9/11 happened and he lost Cantor Fitzgerald, his biggest client. We cut down on some luxuries but, for all I knew, it was business as usual. In 2005, I noticed that he was drinking more, and I didn’t know why. It turned out that over the past few years, he’d used the girls’ college funds and all our savings to keep the business afloat. Oh, and the house was being foreclosed on. And I was just the stupid housewife asking, “Are we okay? Can I do anything?” while our lives burned to the ground.