Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  A few months after I started taking these meetings, my parents called me from the road.

  “We are coming to visit you for your birthday,” my mom chirped. “We’re on our way already!”

  “But I have to work. I have a busy week,” I said, trying to explain the demands of my schedule.

  Eventually I gave up resistance: I’d have to take the day off from my lobbying job and cancel the few Craigslist meetings I had set up.

  When they arrived, they insisted on seeing the building where I worked. I took them inside the lobby and introduced them to the guards. My parents looked small and out of place, and my mom’s eyes welled up with tears.

  “We are so proud of you, Helena,” my mom said. “You must be so happy here. Take a photo of us!”

  When I look at the snapshot of my parents grinning ear to ear in front of the building I hated going inside every day, I think about how much I hid from them. I couldn’t tell them how unhappy I was because I didn’t want to ruin their joy over my accomplishments. Inside, I was filled with anxieties shared by many first-generation immigrants and people my age. I felt that practical choices and financial stability were more important than taking risks and doing work that I valued and loved.

  When we moved to this country from Albania, we were dirt-poor. I slept on a futon in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment from age thirteen to eighteen. My dad, a former ambassador, started working as a Barton security guard at the Home Depot. My mom—a former doctor—was cleaning houses to keep us afloat. I often came home from school and saw my mother crying.

  “Don’t worry, Mama. It will be okay,” I would say, feeling the weight of my parents’ sacrifices.

  On the weekends, I tagged along and helped her. We would stop at Dunkin’ Donuts, grab two medium coffees, share an egg-and-cheese croissant, and drive our beat-up 1985 Ford Tempo up the long driveways of Connecticut mansions.

  “This is why you have to study hard. This is why we came to this country,” my mother would say as we busied ourselves washing, dusting, vacuuming, making beds, and taking out the trash.

  “Do you think we’ll ever have a house of our own?” she’d ask every now and again, usually as she was scrubbing ferociously, elbow-deep in someone else’s bathtub.

  “Of course, Mama,” I’d say, planning out the future in my mind. When I grew up, I would get my parents their own little house. I would make sure my mom never cried again and that my dad never stressed over bills. I would justify everything they’d gone through.

  But when I finally did “make it” as a lawyer, I didn’t know which loan or bill to pay off first. I worked long hours, and I barely got to see my parents at all. Our nightly phone calls became shorter and shorter. Still, I sent them photos of my office that they shared with anyone and everyone, beaming with pride over their only daughter.

  The unhappier I became, the more I searched in others’ faces for a glimpse of my own feelings. But I saw only the well-guarded facades of people who had been taught the same things I had: be ambitious, be successful, be happy, be tough. And so, when we celebrated my birthday at dinner that night, I didn’t tell my parents about my Craigslist meetings. I didn’t tell them how unhappy I was at work, either. I am smiling in all the photos that we took that night, and what’s really surprising is that I look happy.

  I went in to work the next day, and I got called to the boss’s office. Taking the day off, especially on short notice, was “discouraged” at work. Even though I’d tied up all the loose ends, he wasn’t happy. The head of HR was there, too. I made little effort to do any damage control. In fact, the timing felt perfect. I’d spent many sleepless nights discussing my job with Alex. When the Craigslist meetings took off, I was doing as many as five or six a week, plus a full-time job. I was so taken by my side project that I had escapist daydreams about quitting my “real” job and just taking meetings. Alex and I had discussed things loosely—a plan of attack on the very off chance that I’d have the opportunity to focus on the meetings full-time. As I sat in front of HR and my boss, I had a “now or never” sort of moment. Somehow the conversation turned to my “not seeming happy” there, and I didn’t contradict them. Before I knew it, I was telling them that I didn’t think the job was a good fit. I felt that my position there had been misrepresented and that the salary was criminal. In short, I quit. My boss seemed surprised—was I sure? Did I want to stay on for an extra two weeks to give it another chance and reconsider? On the spot, I decided against it. I took two weeks’ pay and secured a positive recommendation for a future employer, and I went back to my office.

  Before I’d had a chance to process what had happened, the HR director knocked on my door and handed me a couple of empty boxes.

  “If you don’t want to pack right now, you can arrange it with me to come by and pick up your personal belongings this weekend,” she said. I decided I’d had enough anxiety for the day, so I packed my bag and walked out of the building. Truth be told, I felt a little triumphant. It was a beautiful day. Things seemed very hopeful. Mostly, I was excited to get to work with the Craigslist meetings. I had this overwhelming feeling that I was sitting on something so much bigger than myself and that I owed it to my subjects to see it through.

  I was walking in the direction of home, past the fire station on Thirteenth and L Streets in DC. Lost in thought, I didn’t notice the commotion as a fire truck prepared to leave the station. I stepped in its way, and the driver laid on the horn, blasting me out of my thoughts and into reality: Holy shit. I just quit my job. I called Alex, sobbing.

  It took a little while to get into the swing of things. Depending on how the ads did and how many I posted, I probably took a maximum of ten meetings a week. There were slow weeks during which I chose to focus on writing. But my goal was to give the Craigslist meetings my all for a year. That’s it. One year of listening. I didn’t try to get the word out, and I didn’t try to get the stories published. I didn’t want to think too far down the road, to clutter my head with preoccupations about monetizing my passion, legitimizing it to others—although of course the pressure was always there. But for the first year, my goal was to do something in service of others. I had a little bit of money saved; I deferred my loans, and I opened up a credit card. With Alex’s blessing, I dove in.

  The time went by incredibly quickly. Alex saw me through countless crises—low points during which I questioned my sanity. What was I thinking? Usually, they were triggered by conversations with well-meaning friends and acquaintances who just couldn’t understand why I’d quit a perfectly good job to listen to people complain about their problems. Isn’t that what therapy is for? And you do it for free?

  It would have been intolerable to field these questions from my parents, so I decided not to tell them. For a little over a year, my parents were under the impression that their daughter was still blissfully working away as a lobbyist. I finally did tell them when Alex and I decided to move to New York. The move prompted a conversation about finding new employment, and I figured, Well, now’s as good a time as any. My mother started crying, which I expected. And my father didn’t speak to me for a year, which, to be honest, I also expected. Their disappointment in me was palpable and heartbreaking.

  When we moved to New York, Alex and I started talking about getting married. Of course we had no money. “Negative money,” as we called it, because of the student loans. Three-quarters of our pooled income went to rent, and the rest was food. We didn’t go out. We could afford zero luxuries. The burden of putting Alex through this for the sake of chasing down my passion started to become unbearable. It was supposed to have been one year, but one year was turning into two, and I wasn’t slowing down.

  The energy of New York City gave me courage, though. Within a month of moving here, I’d decided that it was high time to find these stories a home. So I pitched my story as a listener to Quartz and Paul Smalera, the Ideas editor there, agreed to publish it. It did incredibly well for them, and I gathered up th
e gumption to pitch him a column, Craigslist Confessional. He made no promises but agreed to run a few stories and see how they did. The stories ended up having a home on Quartz for almost two years—an incredible run during which they found an audience beyond my wildest dreams. Posting on Craigslist became unnecessary—people were coming to me to share. Not only that, but they were reaching out to become listeners—any advice on replicating what you’re doing? I felt, finally, like I had created the community I was looking for when I started this project—like maybe I wasn’t so crazy to do this, after all.

  Alex and I did end up getting married. We went to city hall, and the license cost us $35—affordable even by our standards. We also adopted a dog, Stanley Zbornak, and New York very quickly started to feel like home. I was writing and taking meetings constantly—things were looking up.

  In January 2017, I was in our living room, scrolling through my news feed, when an article in the Washington Post stopped me in my tracks. It was about that winter’s first homeless casualty in DC. The article, written by Julie Zauzmer, identified Joseph Watkins, also known as “the Cigarette man,” as the man who had passed away on a park bench at the age of fifty-four.

  “They found him on the park bench. My brother died on the park bench,” Denise Watkins, Joe’s sister, had told the reporter. “That’s kind of sad. He was a good soul, you know.”

  Could Denise be the sister Joe had mentioned in our conversation? My heartbeat quickened as I read other details that coincided with what I knew about him—“He was easily distracted, irritable at the merest provocation and prone to rambling [ … ] He couldn’t keep a job. Eventually he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.” This was true of my Joe, too.

  But I kept scrolling through the page, not wanting to believe it, looking for anything that could convince me otherwise. The article quoted a police report that had listed Joe at six foot three and 418 pounds. I remembered him as a slightly-above-average-size man. Frantically, I looked up his name on Google Images, but nothing came up. That night, at around 4:00 a.m., I awoke with a start and groggily pulled up the article again, taking down Julie’s name and email address. The next day, I reached out to her.

  Her response worried me. She hadn’t been able to track down a photo of Joe, but most of our details—with some exceptions—matched up.

  Could the article be referring to the same person? The question bothered me for months. I called up an old friend and told him I was planning on visiting DC. He offered up his couch, and I took the bus from New York to Union Station and hopped on the Red line to Metro Center. I walked past my old building and then to the park nearby. I looked for Joe as I did every time I walked down those streets; he wasn’t there.

  I often think about him and the effect that he has had on my life. I never had a chance to thank him for listening to me that day, and for letting me listen to him. I felt seen and heard for the first time in so long, and I hope I was able to make him feel the same. I wonder, too, what would have happened had I never stopped to talk to him. I would likely still be working in DC. I might have even been happy, who knows? But I would have missed out on meeting and speaking to hundreds of people who have changed my life, who have opened my heart wide and informed the person I am today.

  So, to Joe and all the invisible people who’ve honored me by letting me see them, as they are—vulnerable, raw, afraid, honest, imperfect, and beautiful—thank you. My wish, in return, is that their stories will give you hope, perspective, and closure when you need it. I hope they’ll bring you peace and allow you to open your heart to others with burdens of their own.

  LOVE

  Edie, sixties

  I had a very typical pregnancy. We went to all the visits when my daughter was in utero—standard stuff—and everything checked out. Of course, this was 1980, so technology wasn’t as advanced as it is these days.…

  My daughter was born without complications, and she was a dream baby. I was so happy to have her, although I do remember that the first couple of months as a new mom were challenging, much more so than anyone will honestly tell you. I took Laura to the pediatrician for her two-month checkup, and I remember that he was listening to her heart with a stethoscope for an extra-long time.

  I asked him, “Is everything all right?”

  And he said, “Oh, yeah.”

  And we moved on.

  I didn’t think about the visit again. I was busy raising her, busy being the best mom I could be. I poured all my love and dedication into this little baby. She was a marvel. We couldn’t believe she had come from us. My husband and I would spend hours after she went to sleep just talking about the new things she’d done that day—her personality, her mannerisms. She was decidedly, even then, herself.

  Her fifteen-month checkup came around, and her pediatrician did the standard testing but again listened to her heart for a beat too long.

  And he finally said, “I hear a bit of a heart murmur, but it could be significant or nonsignificant. I’m going to send you to a pediatric heart specialist, and we can go from there.”

  My intuition told me that it was going to be something—not in a fatalistic way. I just knew, though. I knew that something was wrong.

  The specialist asked a few questions and then ordered an ECG, which conclusively told us that she had a heart defect—“a cluster of defects,” they called it. One of the defects, he explained, could cause high blood pressure. The options he gave us were open-heart surgery or medication. Of course, surgery was risky. Medication might be effective, but who knows for how long, or it might not do much at all.

  My husband wasn’t there with me, and cell phones weren’t around, either, so I drove to a gas station and used the pay phone to call my husband and tell him what the doctor had said. Now, I’m a very action-oriented person. When something is “wrong,” I jump in to fix it. That’s my defense mechanism. And I just didn’t give myself a second to feel any kind of way about the news we’d gotten. I just sprang to action.

  I sought a second opinion from a university hospital, and the pediatric heart specialist recommended surgery for two of the defects in the “cluster.” And because I wanted nothing but the best, we also saw a world-renowned specialist who diagnosed Laura with Shone’s syndrome and recommended surgery for three of the defects—coarctation of the aorta, double orifice mitral valve, and something else. I can’t quite remember.

  You know, it’s funny, back in those days all of these fancy medical terms slid off my tongue like I was the pediatric heart surgeon. I read so much that I guess you might even say I knew more about my baby’s heart than the average internist would. But I guess time fades things, even the suffering I thought would be etched into my bones forever.

  We elected to have the aorta treated first because it was the most pressing issue. I read a book to Laura about surgery—it had these illustrations of the doctors wearing masks. Each time I would read it to her, I’d ask her what they were wearing, and she would exclaim, “Masks!” I would start giggling, and she followed suit. I wanted to show her that it wasn’t scary—that she would be okay. Even though my heart ached, I couldn’t let her sense my fear.

  When they wheeled her away the day of her surgery, I didn’t know if I’d ever see my child again. My mind raced. I begged God that she be safe. The whole family was terrified and trying to keep it together. At most hospitals, they tell you what to be prepared for after the surgery is over: lots of tubes, tape, needles, and masks. They tell you not to be alarmed. But my two-year-old just went in for open-heart surgery. Alarmed doesn’t quite cover it.

  After the surgery, the doctors told me that she had looked at them before they put her under and started giggling. My brave baby. She came out of the surgery with two pretty significant scars—one started on her spine, curved under the armpit, and ended under her breast; the other went down the center of her chest. And let me tell you, the pain you feel when you see your child like that—this perfect creation that you housed in your body and soul for nine month
s, that you brought into this world through tears and pain, that is the personified sum of the life-affirming love that you feel for another person—it is obliterating.

  They told us, once we were discharged, that Laura wouldn’t need to be on medication. But we went in for regular checkups every few months, and we took it crisis by crisis. It would be: “Okay, here’s the crisis. You got through it. Now it’s over. When is the next one coming?”

  I was a person who needed to know the facts—the reality—through all of it. I needed to know what they would do to her, what the risks were… everything.

  My husband looked at me one night and he said, “I can’t do that.” Meaning, I can’t know everything. It’s too much.

  And I said to him, “I understand. I’ll do it.”

  He wasn’t good with illness.

  At three years old, Laura had a second open-heart surgery and was on a heart-lung machine. This surgery was to replace her mitral valve. They replaced it with an entirely mechanical one called a St. Jude valve. She would have to be on blood thinners for the rest of her life, they told us. It was a twelve-hour surgery. As a parent, twelve hours of your child under the knife is an eternity. The waiting room is where the trauma deepens because you start thinking to yourself, We were so lucky the first time around. Can we be that lucky again?