Back in the mid-aughts* I was a newly married and freshly minted attending psychiatrist, set upon the world to heal if I could and also to write, to try to make a difference, and to start a family. The internet was coalescing into the mammoth few mainstays we occupy today, but there were still lots of cool websites and places you could visit outside Facebook and AOL. For any interest or hobby you could almost always find a cool blogger who knew all about it, and you could follow along, comment, and get to know them.
One of the best bloggers was @Dooce, Heather Armstrong, who was well known for being fired from her job after writing blog posts about her work. Dooce was clever and funny. She managed to make a blog empire from her pithy observations, lovely photos, and her real pain. The ubiquitous digital camera and then smartphone meant we were welcomed into a cleverly curated, beautiful but fractured life. She was one of the first to monetize her blog with ads and product placement.
She also was very open about her struggles with depression and anxiety, her perfectionism, her hospitalization after the birth of her first daughter, her love/hate relationship with her mother “the Avon World Sales leader,” the joy and horror of raising adorable little monstrous children. She would often make a little playlist with her posts, linking music videos that spoke to her themes and experiences.
(Schumann, Traumerei, the last performance by Vladamir Horowitz)
Like many new moms at the time, I had a lot in common with Dooce. A professional life, two beautiful and dreadful sassy little girls, plenty of pictures of all of it, and a blog on which to write my own (less eloquent) pithy observations. Dooce was even a distant cousin of mine, as her Tennessee family descended from the Boones**.
What was special about Heather Armstrong was she was vulnerable, open, and also willing to share a lot about what made her unlikable. As much as I was jealous of her talent and her looks, I wouldn’t want to be her friend. She seemed enervating and high maintenance, things best taken in small doses. But she could express all the dreck and happiness of motherhood, and for those who suffered from depression, a direct line to her sometimes deeply broken heart.
Once my second child was born I moved on from anonymous mommy blogging and went to other more intellectual interests on the internet, and I stopped reading about Dooce and her family. Occasionally I checked in as she lived out her messy and heartfelt life, left her husband, experimented with her sexuality, and eventually stopped blogging because she became too depressed. She had some experimental treatments at the University of Utah, got together with the perpetually doomed democratic Utah Senate candidate, continued to raise her daughters, and became a full-on Instagram influencer with lots of travel, gorgeous pictures, and terrible poetry***.
I hadn’t thought about her in at least five years before I randomly checked in a few weeks ago. Then yesterday I was scrolling Instagram and saw a post from her ex, who I followed, but not enough to usually see his posts in my feed: “Thank you for all your kindness. Thank you for your support. RIP @DOOCE”
Heather Armstrong got sober two years ago after, as she described, 22 years of numbing herself with alcohol. Her Instagram post from mid april 2023 was just a selfie and “two years” with a heart emoji. According to her partner in the CNN article about her death, she had relapsed and took her own life on Tuesday, leaving behind her teen daughters and a lot of people who loved that fractured picture of a life she lived online. She was 47 years old.
I can’t imagine her pain on Tuesday, or her family’s right now. A long time ago a patient who had a very serious suicide attempt recommended this article to me. Everyone should read it. As much as suicide is the absolute worst fuck you to anyone who loves the victim, it’s also an expression of an intolerable wave of pain that makes the person think the world and even the loved ones would be so much better without them. If you can get through the crest of the wave, if you are sober, if you don’t have easy access to quick deadly means like a gun, its much more likely you will survive a suicidal crisis and attempt. I always try to impress upon my patients that I have my hand out, if they are in trouble, they can grab it.
But sometimes the pain is too much to reach out for that hand. Relapse after sobriety is a dangerous time on its own. It killed Amy Winehouse.
When Robin Williams took his life it led to an increase in suicides for the months afterwards. He had been diagnosed with a terminal form of dementia, but so many people knew and loved him and empathized with his story of addiction and pain, that his act opened the door for them. That’s what suicide does. It’s contagious.
So I worry now about the moms who struggled with post-partum depression and felt known by the two online decades of life and pain by Dooce. I worry about her friends and family, her daughters, her partner, her ex. I don’t know them at all, but even still they are a part of my life. We are all connected. Only two thousand generations connect the first humans to all 8 billion of us now. We all are cousins.
The national suicide and crisis hotline number is 988.
Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath, a poem about her third suicide attempt
*is that what people called the first decade of the 20th century in 1923? It’s so awkward.
**the Boones were prolific. Daniel Boone was one of 10 children who lived to adulthood, and they had up to 17 kids each, so most families descended from people living in North Carolina, Kentucky, or Tennessee had a Boone or two among the ancestors
***I’m not brave enough to share my terrible poetry
Thank you for this, Emily. I, too, stumbled on the news last week and I hadn't read her blogs for probably over ten years. It still stung me somewhere. She was only a year older than me, and while her struggles were more acute than my own, I of course resonate with the desire to make the problems go away, the exhaustion of trying to hold it all together, and the craving for peace. As a superfan of personal sovereignty, I have to bow and honor the ultimate choice of whether to continue one's life or not. AND...I suspect that the moment it's done, there's a realization amidst a flood of laughter that they just missed the memo, and wouldn't they like another try? Reports from bridge jumpers who survive the fall suggest as much. Life is a gift, even when it doesn't feel like it. Maybe especially then.
It turns out I had already read that article your patient referenced! It's so interesting, even the non-sensical brain fearing getting hit by a car while on the way to try and commit suicide. It also makes me sad that some "means restrictions" on guns would make such a difference without impacting the 2FA hardcore fighters.