This story is part of a series called Craigslist Confessional. Writer Helena Bala has been meeting people via Craigslist and documenting their stories for over two years. Each story is written as it was told to her. By sharing them, she hopes to facilitate acceptance and understanding of issues that are seldom publicly discussed, at the risk of fear, stigma, and ostracism. Read more here.
I had a rough start at life. People thought I did drugs or that I was into black magic and stuff. But I rounded the corner into my early twenties and nothing really changed, except the way that I saw myself.
I started internalizing what people had been saying all along—that I was ugly and weird. I lived in a really traditional society and people were not open-minded, so I was bullied constantly. I considered suicide but I was too much of a coward to actually do it. I often thought that if I could only find a woman to love me, to accept me, that everything else would fall into place. It was a really dark and painful time in my life.
My parents and I went out to lunch for my birthday that year. I remember taking a taxi to the restaurant to meet them and sitting across from my mom, who almost immediately started ripping into me.
What made it worse was that my dad just sat there and nodded, as if he agreed with everything she was saying. I walked home that day, and I passed by a place that I knew to be a brothel. The room was dark. It was decorated with red and green lights, and smelled like alcohol and cigarettes. And there were bottles of rum everywhere.
