****REPOST**** This was a post I wrote in 2023 when Heather B. Armstrong passed away. I am posting it today which would have been her 48th birthday.
The art of blogging has been pushed aside by TikTok, Facebook reels, and Instagram posts. Apparently people today don’t have the time to sit and read words on a page. They would rather mindlessly watch videos on social media. I still blog, obviously here I am. I’ve had blogs since the early 2000’s, though none were popular enough to quit my day job. I still hang around and write here and there as a kind of online diary. Maybe some day when I’m gone my posts will be found by someone that takes interest in them. Regardless, I will still write.
I saw yesterday that Heather B. Armstrong, aka Dooce, passed away. I started reading her blog many moons ago. For any of you that aren’t familiar with Heather or her blog, she was THE Mommy Blogger. Her candor and humor were unparalleled. She wrote about raising her children, and later on her sobriety, and her depression. The frequency of her posts declined mid-2015 to a point where there might only be 2 posts in a month. Her last post in April of this year is heartbreaking to go back and read. It starts off with Heather talking about her sobriety and ends up being a sort of tribute to her oldest daughter. The post talks about her 6 month sobriety (in October 2021) and is riddled with references to her grief, pain, and her feelings of being worthless.
When someone takes their own life, it’s easy to go back to blog posts, or think about past conversations and think those were signs, this person needed help, why didn’t someone see that. My heart breaks for her family and everyone who loved her. I’m sure they have questions that will never be answered. Above all that, I can’t imagine the pain that Heather held onto for so long. It is so sad that someone as talented and beautiful as she was, was so overwhelmed, with what exactly we don’t know, that she would find the only solution was suicide.
Going back to some of her old posts, I was drawn to one from May 21, 2021, just two short years ago. I’m not going to quote the whole post, you can go and read it for yourself. I will leave you with the last couple of paragraphs….
“I am not my disease and neither are you.
Please be here. Please be with me. I need you, too. I need you to help me build something for women8 like you and me. That whimper in the husk of what I thought was success is my voice and yours. All these years I was wrong about what that success was supposed to mean.
I had no idea it all happened so that I would end up here in this specific post with you, writing these words and admitting it all to you. Forgive me if I sound like an egomaniacal douche, but you and I are going to change the world.”
-Heather B. Armstrong, AKA Dooce
Heather, you did change the world. I hope you knew that. RIP Heather B. Armstrong
Sweet Peas In Summer 