Dooce

The blogger Heather Armstrong died by suicide a month ago. I’m not sure how I ever began reading her blog, but I just checked my email and I sent my friend a link to her site in 2009, so at some point in the aughts she came onto my radar. I’ve avoided “mommy blogs” like the plague, before and after I had kids, and while she sometimes irritated me, I kept checking in over the years.

When I first started reading, she was funny and profane and the main topics of her writing were poop and how frustrating it was to be a parent. I was on board with both of those. But over the years, she began to complain more and more about how hard everything in her life was. This is typically something that drives me nuts and it drove me even more nuts here because the things she was complaining about were very mundane - a traffic jam, replacing an appliance, having a cold - AND she was rich and privileged, having a nanny and a housekeeper. At this point, I kept reading, but it was more hate-reading, judging her for her weakness and narcissism.

She got divorced in 2012. I’d had no real opinion about her husband or her marriage, except that he looked like a “nice guy” who’s likely a secret misogynist, but other people online completely lost their shit. I guess when you share intimate details about your life to the masses for years, decades, on end, people feel like they have a say in what you do. That’s one of the more interesting and disturbing facets of the internet. She was so famous that her divorce was covered in The New York Times. Think pieces were written about it. Yet she kept sharing.

And I kept reading, now feeling like I was watching a real-time unraveling of a person and a life. She seemed more erratic, bouncing around between new interests and activities. She ran marathons, became a vegan, bought and sold multiple houses, and had a series of boyfriends. She lost an alarming amount of weight but continued to post full-body selfies on Instagram. I think many people probably go through this kind of flailing when they experience a traumatic life change, but I can’t imagine the impulse to share it with the general public.

Then in 2019 articles appeared that she had written a book about her experience with an experimental treatment for severe depression. She had been put into a clinically induced coma 10 times during which she entered a state of brain-death. She claimed that this treatment was remarkably effective and that her depression was much improved. I’ve yet to read this book, but it, of course, takes on a different tone in the wake of her suicide.

After the treatment, her writing became infrequent and erratic. She focused on her new dog and her health problems, to which she attributed her dramatic weight loss. It’s foolish and presumptuous to try and diagnose someone you don’t know based on their social media content, but to me she seemed like a person who was careening out of control. And I kept reading to see where this train was headed and when it would crash.

Then came the revelations that she had been an alcoholic for 20 years. I had guessed that there were deep issues behind the scenes, but I wouldn’t have guessed this one. She was a classic Type A control freak over-achiever and they are not the people that I think of when I think of an alcoholic. She wrote very dramatic posts about the pain of withdrawal and sobriety but also deeply optimistic essays about how this was the dawning of a new era. This all sounded good, but that’s not the feeling that her writing gave me. It’s interesting that you can feel authenticity even through prose, and it didn’t feel real to me. It felt like she wanted it to be real, but that even she knew it wasn’t going to last and that she didn’t have a lot of time left. There was a darkness that pervaded the space between the words.

She didn’t write much after this confession, less than once per month in the subsequent two years. And lots of these posts seemed both defensive and accusatory, linking to criticisms of her or sardonically repeating the awful things people on the internet said about her. Then she went off on an ill-advised rant against gender fluidity in young people (one of her children identifies as non-binary) and people fucking lost their minds. In liberal circles in 2022, nothing pisses people off more than someone being critical of trans people or questioning the wisdom of allowing 12 year-olds to take hormone therapy. I personally don’t have strong feelings about any of this, so I’m always surprised at the vitriol it inspires from people. But if I was a public figure, I wouldn’t touch this topic with a ten-foot pole. It was almost like she was poking a hornet's nest to see if they would swarm. And they did.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people came out the social media woodwork to tell her what a terrible person she was and that her child(ren) should be taken away from her and how completely she should go fuck off. I watched all this unfold the way I watch videos of a crowd crush or the collapse of a Florida condo. There is horror and exhilaration in these things. How have we all become so vengeful and irrational and self-righteous? Were humans always this bad and we just didn’t have the technology to witness it? Or has the technology made us worse?

She was mostly silent after that. I kept waiting for her to take down her website or get off social media, but she didn’t. I wonder if the attention was so addictive that she couldn’t withdraw, even though it was clearly the healthy choice. I would go to shit-talking sites that had whole forums devoted to her, and read comments by women saying the most unbelievable shit. Shit even my awful teenage self wouldn’t have been able to stomach. I imagine Heather must have read some of these things, too. How could you stop yourself at 3 in the morning?

Most mornings I would type in her website address, just to check. I couldn’t explain what I was doing as I never counted myself as a fan of hers, never bookmarked her site, and would have been embarrassed if someone caught me reading it. Blogs have always seemed unbearably light to me, the grown-up equivalent of keeping a diary. I found her insufferably self-centered, but I kept reading, the way I would read anyone’s diary that I found as a child. Staring into the abyss of a wounded psyche is tantalizing, like you’ll someday find the hurt that all the behavior radiates out from.

But really I was checking because I knew she was going to kill herself. I don’t know how I knew this, but it was very clear to me. She was on her way down. I don’t know what the experience was to know her, date her, be her child, and if they could see the decline as well. I hope not. So I wasn’t surprised by the news of her suicide, but I was disturbed, the way I always am when my predictions come to pass.

Her life might have ended this way no matter what era she was born into, but somehow I don’t think so. I think she was a casualty of social media and toxic narcissism. Had she had a normal job and not been an “influencer” she could have focused on something bigger and more important than herself. She wouldn’t have been exposed to the attention and hatred of the masses. She is a cautionary tale of our time and how we have to be hyper-vigilant against the temptations of our world. And the lessons I've learned are simple:

Keep yourself hidden, keep your head down.