The Crushing Sadness When an Internet Friend Dies
Mommyblogging, Mental Illness, and More
Nearly twenty years ago, on Friday, July 11, 2003, Steve showed me his favorite political blogs - Andrew Sullivan, James Lileks, and other long forgotten sites. I thought they were cool, so I promptly set up a free blogspot account and began writing little things for my husband to read at lunch time. I never expected anybody to find it and read it. It was always just for fun.
But people did find my blog and read it, despite the fact that I refused to commit to one type of blogging, and, thus, confused everyone. Some days I was an academic blogger, other days I was political blogger. And some days, I was a personal blogger, who talked about raising kids in a four floor walk-up in Manhattan, while teaching a graduate school class at Columbia.
Personal blogging, sometimes called mommyblogging, was a huge thing back then. Women wrote irreverent, self-deprecating essays about raising kids, a welcome relief from the old-school, saccharine parenting books and magazines. Dooce was the OG mommyblogger, one of my daily reads, and she killed herself this week. I’m heartbroken.
Like so many of the original bloggers, I moved from blogging to mainstream writing to substack. My old blog still exists, but I don’t fill it with daily content anymore. I drop in a few times a week to post links to this newsletter or pictures from out latest trip. While I’m not really a blogger anymore, the blog still exists, so I think I can say that I’ve blogged for twenty years.
Blogging was never a huge money maker for me, yet it still provided many gifts. Blogging taught me how to write stuff that people actually wanted to read, which was very different from my 200-page dissertation with its twenty-page bibliography. Later, when blogging became a vehicle to more prestigious writing gigs, some really great editors taught me even more. And blogging introduced me to fascinating and talented people, who were all agog at how Internet gave them the tools to directly communicate with the masses.
Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, was the original potty-mouthed mommy blogger. She compared her daughter to a slug. She talked about her family and mocked the Mormon religion. In addition to being laugh out-loud funny, she was beautiful. An accomplished photographer, she took great pictures of herself and her family, which have been sadly been stripped from her blog archives. Her husband was a programmer, so he created a professional website for her and together they turned a blog into a million dollar family business with calendars, books, and product endorsements.
She imploded her personal and professional lives in 2012, when she asked her husband for a divorce, and then never really got back to her previous glory years. She wrote a lot about her struggles with depression over the years. More recently, she opened up about her alcoholism and her struggle to accept her child’s new gender identity. Her instagram page was full of emaciated self portraits; clearly she had a serious eating disorder. (Lisa Belkin in the NYT has more info and links.)
Although we exchanged emails a couple of times, I never actually met Dooce in person. She was a guest speaker at one of the blogging conferences that I attended, but we weren’t buddies. Still, I felt like I knew her. Even though the whole blogging enterprise collapsed years ago, I kept following her on Instagram.
Sad about her divorce, I wrote: If you read a blogger for years and years, you feel like you know them. You don't really know them, of course, but there is a closeness.
So, I’m really sad that she killed herself this week, just as I still mourn Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams. Public figures always seem so permanent and invulnerable, even as they are just as fragile and complicated as the rest of us.
Mental health was always a big theme among those people, who started blogging many years ago. Sometimes people put too much information on blogs or TikTok videos, because they are struggling with issues and seek out strangers for support. And it continues to be a big theme on substack. Recently, Freddie deBoer wrote about the death? murder? of a mentally ill homeless man on a New York City subway and that perhaps we should rethink our policies against forcibly committing people with mental health disorders.
I’m drawn to theses discussions, because I know too many people with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and autism. Anyone of them could end up like Jordan Neely or Heather Armstrong. Mental health isn’t just an abstract public policy to me, so I appreciate the efforts of bloggers, substackers, and tiktokers to draw attention to those issues.
Wellness matters. Love matters. We need to make more room for those things in our lives. For those of us who can manage our demons, we have to support those who engage in fierce battles with those demons on a daily basis.
LINKS
As a weekend, estate sale picker, I love this story... Sold for a Song, a Church’s Windows Turned Out to Be Tiffany, NYT
I owe y’all an education policy newsletter. Next week. In the meantime, read this… Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School
Want to de see what deinstitutionalization looks like?
“Studies estimate about 1 to 5% of children nationwide exhibited signs of school refusal before the pandemic…..Education department officials estimate that by year’s end, 37% of the students in kindergarten through 12th grade could be considered chronically absent, defined as missing at least 10% of the school year. That is significantly higher than in 2018-19, the year before the pandemic, when it reached 26%." Chalkbeat
“Drug overdoses now kill the equivalent to a high school classroom of teens every week across the US. About 9 in 10 are caused by fentanyl.”
So, how should we deal with learning lag? Some people want to make that problem disappear. “Students must repeat 3rd grade if they don’t read proficiently. Some lawmakers want to nix the requirement.”
I’m currently pulling together all the paperwork to run for our town’s Board of Education, so I’m finding this whole George Santos thing especially amazing.
PICTURE: Our new master bathroom
ADVENTURE: Steve and Jonah are camping and fishing this weekend, so Ian and I will have a city adventure tomorrow. Maybe the Whitney and a nice restaurant. Not sure yet.
COOKING: Very little. I’m boycotting the whole enterprise right now. Maybe I’ll get inspired when the farmer’s market opens up again.
WATCHING: Lucky Hank, Guardians of the Galaxy, Succession, the Fast and Furious series (it’s truly awful, but we’re watching it with Ian.)