This website was started in 2000. I first made it as a place to get information about our upcoming wedding, but I’d been learning about databases and server-side programming, and by 2001 it had evolved into a web log, powered by an engine I’d written myself. I called it “eXpression” because it used XML webservices – and it helped me express myself online.
Over the past two decades it has served different purposes…
Before social media, it was a way people found me and Nic – people I didn’t know in real life would come up to me and tell me they read our blog, and felt like we were friends. I live-blogged the birth of our son in 2006, and learned afterward that the staff of the entire floor of the hospital we were in had followed along, and shared it with their friends and family.
During transition years, it was a way to keep up with people we’d moved away from. For awhile it was where we shared pictures and anecdotes of our kids growing up. For a few years it went mostly idle as Facebook took its place. In recent times, it’s been a way to process and react to tumultuous times in world history. Sometimes I think of shutting it down, but maybe some day I’ll be glad I saved it all. That is the case for another blog today.
Heather Armstrong was about 5 years older than us. She also started her blog, dooce, in 2001, and became Internet-famous in 2002 when it got her fired. Turns out her co-workers did not enjoy her writing about them online. The term “dooced” became a short-hand for losing your job over your Internet activities. The Instagram and Tik Tok generation should take notes…
I followed dooce for years. Along with a couple other content creators, like wilwheaton.net and Ze Frank, it helped me figure out what kinds of thingsI wanted to publish (and what kinds of things probably shouldn’t.) Heather blogged earnestly and honestly, and when she and her husband Jon became parents, we were often moved by her transparency and vulnerability about the deep, joyful, heart-wrenching and life-changing experience of bringing a new human into the world. We didn’t always agree with their parenting style or life choices, but we appreciated her open and frank exploration of the feelings, decisions and challenges that new parents have to face. Dooce was, and is, an important part of what the Internet was supposed to look like – before exploiting people became a big business; when it was just individuals trying to use technology to connect, and experience the world through another person’s words…
Heather died earlier this week. On her second attempt in as many years, she succeeded in taking her own life.
Despite millions of followers on her various social media, and being (rightfully!) trumpeted as the “queen of the mommy bloggers” and a social justice champion for women, she died alone and in pain. And although many are spouting their affection for her now, thousands of her followers had rejected and attacked her viewpoint on her own, and her daughter’s, mental health.
Her suicide wasn’t the result of that rejection. Recent years of her blog chronicle her divorce, struggles with depression, substance abuse, an eating disorder and her previous suicide attempt. She clearly had a lot of pain and trauma that had tormented her for years. But in August of 2022, she penned one her most personal and deep blog posts, asserting that the counseling she had received, and that the path her eldest child had been lead down, were wrong. From the post, it appears both had been told that gender issues were the root cause of their pain, and were guided towards some kind of transition as a way to resolve their pain. In her post, Heather rejected this theory – not for everyone: she acknowledges that some people struggle with that very pain. But she asserts that gender issues have become a social disease; a blanket assumption to be applied to everyone experiencing trauma, and that this sweeping “solution” causes more suffering than people realize.
For this slightly more nuanced position on the gender debate, Heather was viciously attacked on social media. As bloggers write their own eulogies for her now, some still describe that post as being hateful. She took the post down shortly after the attacks began, and while the Internet Archive still has a copy, I’m also attaching it to this blog post. Because despite all Heather did to be heard and seen, when she really needed it, our culture turned against her.
I hadn’t read dooce in years. Like this blog, it transformed multiple times, and she lost me in there somewhere. But if Heather left a legacy for the Internet, it is a cautionary one, told in three parts. At the beginning, it was a reminder that what we do online is not really separate from our real lives — or our jobs. In the middle, it is a clear illustration that Internet-fame may pay the bills for some, but it does not bring happiness. And at the end, it proves that real human connection, that actual unconditional, agape love cannot be sold online, brokered through digital media, or counted in followers…
Heather correctly identified her religious upbringing as largely abusive, and wrote often about escaping the baggage it carried. But there was still very obviously a hole in her life – one she tried almost everything to fill. I don’t know what the other side looks like for her (or really for any of us), but I hope that there was at least a moment where she felt real love, and real connection – if not in this life, than in the next one…
