Helena Dea Bala: ...that I would find myself in every stranger I met

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joining us on this episode is Helena Dea Bala, author of the new book, Craigslist Confessional: A collection of secrets from anonymous strangers, which The New York Times called 'touching'. She was the true definition of the American dream: an Albanian immigrant who came to the United States as a child, went to George Washignton University, and became a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. However, at the end of her work day, she found herself unfulfilled and realized that the most content she felt was in her daily conversations with a homeless man (a stranger) who she felt she could be completely honest with. This sparked her to take a leap of faith, quit her job, and post a sentence on Craigslist: 'tell me about yourself.' Over the course of the years, she has met up with strangers on Craigslist and documented their stories, coming to the conclusion that behind the scenes, we are all struggling with the same issues.

You can buy the book at https://www.amazon.com/Craigslist-Confessional-Collection-Secrets-Strangers/dp/1982114967.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Nobody Told Me.
0:13.4	I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.
0:15.7	And joining us on this episode is Helena Deiabala, author of the new book Craigslist Confessional, a collection of
0:23.0	secrets from anonymous strangers. And since 2014, Helena has been meeting people on Craigslist
0:29.0	and documenting their stories. And even just from that, we are so excited to talk with you.
0:33.7	You must have so many amazing things that you've learned about people and humanity in general.
0:38.1	So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm very excited to talk
0:44.0	about the stories in this book. Let's start out with your background. You were an immigrant to the
0:48.7	U.S. who became a lawyer and then found that that wasn't fulfilling. And you found a very interesting way to try and
0:55.3	seek fulfillment. Talk to us a little bit about that. It wasn't just swimming or picking up a hobby.
1:00.6	Yeah. So I came to this country when I was not even 12, barely 12 years old. And I came from Albania
1:09.0	with my mom. We sought political asylum here.
1:12.6	And the first few months, I would say probably even year after we immigrated to this country,
1:20.1	were very, very difficult in that my mom, who was a former family medicine doctor and
1:27.4	my dad, who joined us later, who was an ambassador,
1:30.4	they both took on jobs that were quite challenging in order to make ends meet.
1:37.2	And so my mom and I actually ended up cleaning houses for a long while just to kind of make a little bit of money.
1:47.0	And that was my first foray into this world, or rather this idea that things look different from the outside than they actually are
1:53.4	from the inside, this duplicity, this acting that we tend to do, performance, I should say,
2:03.9	when portraying ourselves to the outside world.
2:10.7	And I think that's also where some of my sensitivity to that came from. And my parents were very,
2:19.0	very pragmatic in light of all of these big sacrifices that they've made, you know, for me to be able to go to school and to have a good life. They wanted me to do something that was kind of easy and safe. And so law
	...

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