Dooce Died (Newsletter No. 63)

With a name like Dooce, there’s no way to write a headline without it seeming like a joke.

Heather Armstrong killed herself (July 19, 1975 – May 9, 2023). Five days before Mother’s Day. She was most famous for blogging about her daughters from pregnancy till present. She struggled with depression for the majority of her life. And then she committed suicide. She was 47, her daughters are 19 and 13 years old.

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Some major and minor notes about her life that made her suicide shocking but unsurprising:

-She took her parents’ divorce extremely hard (9-11 years old)

-She had an eating disorder (16-present years old)

-She was valedictorian of her high school in 1993…and never stopped mentioning it (17 years old)

-She had a hard time with her Mormon faith and left the church by the time she was in college. Perhaps she conflated the stifling or possibly even corrupt administration with the value of faith and ritual as a grounding and centering force. (19-21 years old)

After leaving the Mormon Church, she struggled with alcoholism since she was 25 years old.

-She married her husband in 2002. He was still legally married when they started dating, they had a significant age gap, it was a relatively hasty union, and they eloped (she was 27 and he was 37 years old).

-She had postpartum depression after the birth of her 1st daughter (29 years old)

-She separated and divorced her husband in 2012-2013, about 10 years after they got married (38 years old)

-She committed suicide in 2023, 10 years after her divorce (47 years old)

-She dated openly and serially shortly after her separation from her husband, or perhaps even before it.

-She has dated men that were still/already in relationships and received criticism for it.

-She mocked cruelty free animal products, then briefly became a vegan. She briefly became vegan, then mocked veganism. She also became transiently fervent about other diets like paleo, sugar-free, gluten-free.

-She proudly announced her nonbinary daughter, then cautioned about the dangers of praising gender dysphoria, which brought on an onslaught of backlash from both sides of the opinion spectrum

-She blamed short attention spans from social media for a waning interest in her content, when really it was the quality of the writing. It was less honest. I mean, people are reading lengthy Substacks and listening to lengthy podcasts.

-She blamed haters for bullying her, which is not untrue, but instead of stepping away, she engaged in the firefight, obsessively searching for all the mean things people were saying about her.

-She branded herself a mental health advocate to “make people feel like they are seen” when she could barely help herself. She gained popularity and profit from writing about her depression struggles, it is a conflict of interest between her own mental health and her income, blurring the lines between honesty and victimhood.

-It seems that she cut off people that were concerned for her (perhaps she called them toxic?) or at least she was difficult to talk to about her issues. Perhaps by the end of her life, she was only surrounded by people who tread lightly around her or enabled her. She has always seemingly struggled with her emotions, but her “manic rambling spiral” seems to coincide with the time she began her relationship with her most recent boyfriend. Ultimately, no one had enough finesse to persuade her to open her heart.

-By the end of her desperation, she experimented with extremely risky physiological treatments for her depression, which she perhaps thought showed her dedication to staying alive, when it can also be interpreted as an avoidance of the core abyss of her emotional pain. Perhaps the solution lay more in healing her soul.

-Her job enabled her to stay at home, not talk to people, and ruminate A LOT. For someone that is mentally unstable, constant rumination makes your world small and distorted.

-Her last post was a love letter to her oldest daughter, and her oldest daughter only.

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Tragedies are tragedies, but so particularly sad that this mother chose to take her life at the most pivotal moments of her daughters’ lives. She was 47, they are 19 and 13. You can point to mental illness, but that doesn’t mean that the suicide wasn’t also a selfish act. Add on top of that that she was most famous and successful for writing about her daughters’ lives to millions of strangers. She profited from their lives, and then she left them. Isn’t that kind of like, exploitation? There are thousands of people writing condolence comments about how Heather’s early honesty about parenthood struggles saved their lives, but what point is there if she couldn’t even actually be there for her own children? After the shock wears off for the rest of us, her suicide will seem like it was always part of her story. After all the peaks and valleys of real time living, her story arc ended in a valley. Her daughters will be the ones that have to live with the consequence for the rest of their lives. I wonder if they feel anger or relief.

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She wrote about how much she loved her two healthy, smart, talented and funny daughters, it wasn’t enough

She wrote about her supportive parents, it wasn’t enough

She wrote about her awesome extended family, it wasn’t enough

She wrote about how incredible her partners were, it wasn’t enough

She was a huge music lover, it wasn’t enough

She travelled, it wasn’t enough

She wrote poems, took photos, drew pictures, it wasn’t enough

She was on the board of directors for Every Mother Counts and saw extreme poverty, it wasn’t enough

She ran marathons, it wasn’t enough

She had dogs, it wasn’t enough

She had fame, it wasn’t enough

She had money, it wasn’t enough

She had physical beauty, it wasn’t enough

She got validation from friends and family, it wasn’t enough

She sought and got validation millions of strangers, it wasn’t enough

She got critiqued by strangers, it was too much

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Postmortem:

-Don’t post about your kids on the internet

-Don’t write about major life events positive or negative under the guise of “helping others,” the financial and notoriety incentive will always influence motive. Also, you can’t help strangers if you can’t even help yourself.

-If you’re going to write about your life at all, wait for a significant amount of time to pass (months or years), after you’ve properly processed it, perhaps well after the people mentioned are dead

-Don’t take and post selfies, especially the kind that attempt to present a micromanaged image

-If you hate how your body looks, stop looking at yourself, don’t get your hair done instead

-If you can’t handle the criticism of thousands of strangers, make every effort to avoid reading their thoughts.

-Don’t go looking for mean things people say about you. The limit does not exist. You may find the meanest things you think about yourself already, and then the meanest things about yourself that did not even occur to you.

-Don’t seek the validation of strangers, especially if you’re emotionally unstable. If you have a problem, talk to people in your real life, not the intangible internet audience. Heather’s death notice on her Instagram received thousands of loving comments. Her previous post about her dog received about 60. You cannot rely on strangers to know when you need comfort. Related: There is no morality to transparency to strangers. It’s none of their business.

-The farther and more you travel does not mean the more enlightened you will become

-Fake it till you make it often does not work for gratitude. You can list all the things you are grateful for, but if your mind body and spirit are not present in those thoughts, those words of gratitude are only white noise to your soul.

-When it comes to religion, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you tell me your house of worship is corrupt, I’ll believe you. But don’t throw away the whole religion in anger. Because, if you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything. People who disdain religion end up creating their own haphazard patchwork of spirituality out of crystals, astrology, yoga, meditation, tarot cards, good vibes. And then they’ll wonder why they are still anxious.

-Reach out in reasonable increments to people who are unwell and who have mistreated you, if they were ever at one point supremely wonderful to you. Believe in them. Believe that they are redeemable. Whenever you feel resentment, think, what would Jesus/Buddha do.

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Excerpt from Heather’s most recent published post:

On October 8th, 2021 I celebrated six months of sobriety by myself on the floor next to my bed feeling as if I were a wounded animal who wanted to be left alone to die. There was no one in my life who could possibly comprehend how symbolic a victory it was for me, albeit it one fraught with tears and sobbing so violent that at one point I thought my body would split in two. The grief submerged me in tidal waves of pain. For a few hours I found it hard to breathe.

I had isolated myself entirely from the outside world because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. And I was embarrassed. Here, two years into this often frenzied and wandering dance with life, I understand that I couldn’t hold anyone’s gaze because everywhere I looked I saw nothing but my own worthlessness. And so I chose loneliness. I couldn’t handle the idea of anyone else knowing just how bad I felt about myself.

I now understand that “what was happening to me” was a physical reconciliation with pain. 22 years of agony I had numbed with alcohol had come alive and transformed itself into an almost alien life form. I often felt like I was being electrocuted for hours at a time. The core of my body absorbed the shock of it all, and it brought me to my knees. I was forced to stare this wild-eyed savage straight in the face, and now I look around and think, “Oh, this. This is just life. All of this is just a physical reaction to psychological pain.”

Sobriety was not some mystery I had to solve. It was simply looking at all my wounds and learning how to live with them.

Most of us are unlikely to live and die like Heather did, but most of us are likely to look for happiness in the wrong places. Heather tried most of them. Happy Mother’s Day.