Dooce /Heather Armstrong

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly. Your children you charming and smugly admit you can’t control are the same ones you’re going to be fishing out of an upstairs bathtub, administering Narcan to or having their stomachs pumped someday.
Raising my kids right and keeping an eye on them, being sure they are guided to understand how to make good choices until the actually exhibit good choice making is not smug control. It’s what parenting is. I will not throw my hands up and let the beasts in!

As an adolescent therapist, I feel like you’re inviting the universe to test you. Children of protective, good parents also can struggle a lot. And you as the parent may be the last to know.

Yes I totally get that too! But I also think we need to try our best and not shame parents who are out there trying, yes like myself. Another truth is that just giving kids so much access to social media does cause harm and bring along other issues so my hopes that I’m able to fend that off and help keep some balance in our home lives should be supported, not derided.

Wait, the person who told another parent they'd be "fishing [their kid] out of an upstairs bathtup" someday is complaining that someone "derided" them and that "we need to try out best and not shame parents who are out there trying"? smh

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:So on top of all the time spent here, you all really spend a lot of time reading poorly written half truths about women’s lives. I cannot believe how seriously people take bloggers like this. I can’t believe it is therapeutic or helpful in any way.

What she did wasn’t really writing, it was preening. I’m so sorry she passed. However, and her lunatic fans will freak — none of her shtick would have worked but for her initial happy life, thinness, prettiness. The writing was never there, she is not Mary Carr or Leslie Jamison. It always required pictures and cool-girl blasé bullshit balanced with meltdowns. It was always stupid and squawking and without much to it, all hat and no cattle. But it gave a lot of ugly comfort to some women, as they were less divorced. Less f’ed up. Less drunk. Less scrutinized. And so forth. It was always gross, but it netted Armstrong a lot of money. I wish she’d found some medication and therapeutic plan that actually worked for her. I don’t actually think she’s more gifted than the banal, stupid Jo from Cup of Jo. But Jo was luckier.

Exactly. But Jo also made her own luck!!! She works on her mental health, controls her drinking, writes openly but is not overexposed. Joanna has struck a really good balance and is running a business where the product is women’s interest in each other, not just in HER.

Heather was a prisoner of her attachment to her own physical attractiveness, her wit, her counterculture iconoclast vibe. A mentally ill narcissist who wrought fury and hellfire on her own ex husband, partner and daughters.

What someone else wrote is true. Dooce was a shallow, sick addict who preened for attention, who virtually gagged for it and lived and died for it. She was a grotesque example of the worst of influencer culture and to dislike her is not to be a GOMI troll, it’s to be an adult with one’s own opinion. Quit bringing Alice and GOMI into it! Your obsession with GOMI says more about YOU than GOMI itself. Alice is NOT responsible for these narcissists that overexpose their lives for likes and affiliate link $$!!!

Ok, Alice. You can head back to your own corner of the internets now.

I'm a different poster who had never heard of GOMI, but the PP is dead on about this Dooce. Why do so many posters here defend these narcissistic, drug-addicted, dilettantes?

This is an ugly sentiment and it resonated with me. I don't know a great deal about dooce, so why should I feel anything at all, let alone relate to a negative sentiment about her? Upon reflection, I think it has to do with the narcissism and dilettante description, coupled with the fact that she was famous and, for a time anyway, successful. It feels like an affront to the sacrifices most people make in the name of stability and love for others; particularly as parents and spouses. We stay at home or take grind-it-out jobs, we don't flit from thing to thing, we make the world better for friends and loved ones -- at least in a small way, we don't chase long shot dreams, and our sacrifices generally don't get recognized, let alone rewarded. Meanwhile, here is a woman who seemingly did none of that -- at least not on a sustained basis; and she was showered with riches and attention.

This is a very jaundiced view of the situation; but I think it's what is going through my head when I feel myself tempted to nod at hostile descriptions of a woman I didn't know and could easily avoid reading or reading about.

A lot of self awareness here and I think one reason you see a big divide in reactions.

I don't envy Dooce's life at all, including her fame and the positive attention she received. I don't even envy her success as a writer even though I am a writer (who has a day job that pays the bills).

I admire her success in finding a writing voice that worked for what she wanted to share with the world, and I appreciate that she found a way to create her own venue for connecting with readers instead of going through traditional systems, most of which are set up to keep out people who are not already on the inside of the systems.

But I don't resent her or feel anger towards her because I can see she DID in fact make sacrifices for her success. She sacrificed her privacy, and her family's privacy, and she put herself in the way of people eager to tear down people like herself. Why would I envy that? I have intentionally not made those choices.

I also can see that she had mental illness that was made much worse by those choices, and I have enough empathy to understand that she may not have understood how bad those impacts would be, or may have struggled to make better choices. I have people in my own family who have addiction issues and struggle with these choices. I work hard not to judge. I know it's hard. I don't know why it's easier for me to make those healthy choices and harder for them. I wish I could do something to help them make the healthy choices. But I can't. This is life. It's one of the hard truths of life that everyone must make these decisions for themselves, for better and sometimes, for worse.

So I don't get the vitriol. Her story is complicated and it has some great things (her writing helped and resonated with a lot of people who had never had access to her kind of truth-telling about life before) and some sad and disappointing things (her addiction issues, her inability to preserve her children's privacy, her mental health challenges that she never found a way to overcome). Why not recognize the good, recognize the bad, remember that no human being is perfect and wish her family the very best in their grief?

Railing against her and criticizing anyone who saw good in her seems like it's own kind of unhealthy choice, IMO.

I am one of the PPs who is being intepreted as "railing against her." But to be clear, I think she was a very big mess of a person who did great harm to her children, but can understand that seeningly she had no control over herself. Who I find abhorent is her audience. I consider them all to be like those who slow down on the highway to see the aftermath of a fatal car crash. By reading her, they did nothing but enable her behavior and put her and her family at more risk. I had never heard of her before this thread, but I cannot imagine spending time reading such a train wreck of a life just so I could feel better about mine. Though, yes, I disparage Dooce, I find her readers to be despicable.

You don’t understand the timeline. Dooce was not unhinged when her readership was really strong. The only objectionable behavior she participated in was putting cute photos of her kids online (which a lot of us did too) and putting spaghetti noodles on her dog’s nose (people were apparently pretty pissed at her for that). As far as my reading habits were concerned, she was in the same category as Ree Drummond and Karen Waldrond. Later, her readership dropped and her behavior and writing became more erratic. She stepped away almost entirely for a while, and now we are here. I don’t think that you can say that her readers enabled her.

Well, she blogged for a living, how did they not? And most people come on here with their admiration say it was because she helped them understand how imperfect it all is. They loved her swearing and her imperfect life. Sounds to me like she overshared from the very beginning and readers lapped it up.

You don't get it. I read Dooce YEARS ago. Like 15 years ago? Before I even had kids. I remember coming across her blog and reading her regularly for a while. I don't really even remember the stuff she wrote about her kids, because I wasn't a mom and that aspect wasn't as compelling to me -- I don't remember her posting photos of their faces or writing a lot about them. What I remember her writing about was growing up in a strictly religious family in a strictly religious place and then having an awakening in her 20s as she realized she didn't agree with the church she was raised in. I remember her writing about having a kind of delayed adolescence, because she'd been a "good girl" all those years and done what she was told, and then realizing she didn't really agree with a lot of it and having to sort of re-grow up. And also having to do this while also raising kids. I remember her writing about herself and her own experience, the way essayists have done for decades and decades.

This resonated so much with me. I wasn't raised mormon but I was raised Catholic, but I went through something similar. Dooce was a few years older than I am, and I found it so valuable to read her (yes, confessional) writing on these subjects and to feel less alone in all of it. I felt seen. I think I only read her blog regularly for maybe a year and a half, and then I forgot about it, and I really wasn't that aware of what had become of her since.

Hearing about her decline, and now her suicide, hits particularly close to home for me because while I never developed any addictions, like Dooce, I struggled with depression that I do think might be related to the way I was raised and the ways it did not at all prepare me for how life actually is. And my siblings have also struggled with mental health, and two of them definitely struggle with addiction, and those two have also struggled with suicidal ideation.

So yes, reading more about her life now, I can objectively say that some of the way she approached her writing was unethical, especially regarding her kids, and she was a complicated person who wasn't right all the time or even most of the time. I can judge some of her choices and I can also think of my own family members who have made some similar choices and recognize that they probably weren't all choices in the way people think about them.

So sitting there and judging me or saying I'm "abhorrent" for having read Dooce and deriving something good and comforting and important from her writing, or having empathy for her instead of just judging and hating her? Sorry, no. You don't get it. You can love something someone wrote and it doesn't mean you condone every single thing they ever did in their lives. You can see the humanity in someone and also acknowledge that it cuts both ways, that they did good and lovely things and also terrible and regrettable things, and you can just live with that juxtaposition because that's life.

The people on this thread who are angry at those of us who liked or got something out of Dooce's writing are broken too, and you can't even see it because you are so cloaked in self-righteousness that you can't see what is wrong with dancing on a woman's grave and pointing and laughing and ridiculing the mourners.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly. Your children you charming and smugly admit you can’t control are the same ones you’re going to be fishing out of an upstairs bathtub, administering Narcan to or having their stomachs pumped someday.
Raising my kids right and keeping an eye on them, being sure they are guided to understand how to make good choices until the actually exhibit good choice making is not smug control. It’s what parenting is. I will not throw my hands up and let the beasts in!

As an adolescent therapist, I feel like you’re inviting the universe to test you. Children of protective, good parents also can struggle a lot. And you as the parent may be the last to know.

Yes I totally get that too! But I also think we need to try our best and not shame parents who are out there trying, yes like myself. Another truth is that just giving kids so much access to social media does cause harm and bring along other issues so my hopes that I’m able to fend that off and help keep some balance in our home lives should be supported, not derided.

Wait, the person who told another parent they'd be "fishing [their kid] out of an upstairs bathtup" someday is complaining that someone "derided" them and that "we need to try out best and not shame parents who are out there trying"? smh

Sounds like you literally don’t know what parents of high school and college aged kids are dealing with today….. this shit is happening out there and pretending that social media, alienation, disconnection from reality and more aren’t huge factors and parents aren’t deeply complicit in this is not going to help. Yes it’s hard but it’s worth it.
Do you think the Armstrong girls’ life’s were enhanced by Dooce’s furious navel baring site? Any parent? No!

[Anonymous]

The GOMI-type people who hate a lot of bloggers generally and Armstrong specifically like the one above are such hypocrites. They come out fists flying with the most personal insults imaginable (your child will die alone in a bathtub!) but push back against their rhetoric at all and they have the gall to whine that you are deriding or shaming them. They hurl such personal attacks for people who have such thin skins themselves. It's exactly as PP above states, "you can't even see it because you are so cloaked in self-righteousness that you can't see what is wrong with dancing on a woman's grave and pointing and laughing and ridiculing." I think the tone of GOMI warps people's sense of empathy over time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bloggers and influencer are narcissists. In order to satisfy their need for praise and attention they exploit their marriages, children, and all personal relationships. Such a sad life. Caring more about strangers on the Internet than the real people in their lives.

That's a very superficial take. Bloggers ran the whole spectrum of humanity.

They do, but….

There are bloggers who provide material content. Recipes. Home decorating/repair information/tutorials. Hair or makeup tutorials. Information about travel.

Turning your (and your family’s) life into your content does prove that you think your life is valuable for other people to spectate. And if you want life spectators… you’ve got some narcissistic tendencies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bloggers and influencer are narcissists. In order to satisfy their need for praise and attention they exploit their marriages, children, and all personal relationships. Such a sad life. Caring more about strangers on the Internet than the real people in their lives.

That's a very superficial take. Bloggers ran the whole spectrum of humanity.

They do, but….

There are bloggers who provide material content. Recipes. Home decorating/repair information/tutorials. Hair or makeup tutorials. Information about travel.

Turning your (and your family’s) life into your content does prove that you think your life is valuable for other people to spectate. And if you want life spectators… you’ve got some narcissistic tendencies.

Isn’t it more complicated than that? Lots of writers have written about their lives and families without being reviled now as narcissists (Laura Ingalls Wilder, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Dave Barry). I think it’s more about what you say and how you say it than choosing to write about your own life in itself.

David Sedaris got in trouble with fans ten years ago after his sister, who had become estranged from him after he wrote about her and who suffered from mental illness, committed suicide and he wrote about their relationship. Fans were divided over whether her life was fair game after her death. Writers have hit these boundaries before about respecting the private lives of others around them.

I think we know better now not to put our kids into our lives online, but we didn’t all really know that when the Internet was a baby. Some kinds of social media now that are focused on the person as a “brand” seem weird. I wouldn’t do that with my life, and that seems more narcissist to me than a mom writing about today’s sandbox fight, but what do I know?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly. Your children you charming and smugly admit you can’t control are the same ones you’re going to be fishing out of an upstairs bathtub, administering Narcan to or having their stomachs pumped someday.
Raising my kids right and keeping an eye on them, being sure they are guided to understand how to make good choices until the actually exhibit good choice making is not smug control. It’s what parenting is. I will not throw my hands up and let the beasts in!

As an adolescent therapist, I feel like you’re inviting the universe to test you. Children of protective, good parents also can struggle a lot. And you as the parent may be the last to know.

Yes I totally get that too! But I also think we need to try our best and not shame parents who are out there trying, yes like myself. Another truth is that just giving kids so much access to social media does cause harm and bring along other issues so my hopes that I’m able to fend that off and help keep some balance in our home lives should be supported, not derided.

You were not shamed. Come on. PP just said that you won't be so smug in a few years. Maybe you still will be holding onto your self-righteousness, maybe you will be able to say no to social media even though your child is isolated because that's how all the other kids connect, but the comment about drowning in the bathtub, especially coupled with the "you deserve whatever comes in," comment, was just awful and completely uncalled for.

[Anonymous]

A lot of people write to process stuff, and put it on line to get help in processing what happened. Does that make you a narcissist, necessarily, or someone who is trying to understand your life and the people around you? I thought narcissists didn’t especially care about other people or relationships.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bloggers and influencer are narcissists. In order to satisfy their need for praise and attention they exploit their marriages, children, and all personal relationships. Such a sad life. Caring more about strangers on the Internet than the real people in their lives.

That's a very superficial take. Bloggers ran the whole spectrum of humanity.

They do, but….

There are bloggers who provide material content. Recipes. Home decorating/repair information/tutorials. Hair or makeup tutorials. Information about travel.

Turning your (and your family’s) life into your content does prove that you think your life is valuable for other people to spectate. And if you want life spectators… you’ve got some narcissistic tendencies.

FWIW, I barely knew who this person was, but also see some narcissistic tendencies in the people who feel compelled to show up on a thread about someone who just died (by suicide) to point out how they always knew how horrible said person was. Something worth examining in therapy, methinks.

[Anonymous]

Just came here to say that I'm another person who read Dooce really frequently years and years ago before I had kids - I read her more for what was at the time, her snarky attitude and her stories about life as a mom/wife plus stories about her Award Winning Avon Saleslady mom and growing up in a very Mormon house (I'm not Mormon).

Then her writing really took a super off the rails/narcissistic turn (yes, even more than it was at the time). She wrote about bands as if SHE DISCOVERED THEM and no one else had ever heard of them before she posted about them on her blog, she started stealing stuff from The Bloggess (who is awesome) etc. Every now and again I'd go back and see what she was on about. Saw that her and Jon divorced. She started dating that really young guy and was flying all over with him/to see him and then that ended (seemingly by him). I sort of really fell out after that.

But hearing the news last week really hit me. One, I'm a mom now. Two, even though I knew she was off the rails most of her life, I was truly shocked about her taking her life with Marlo and Leta behind. I know those who are suicidal aren't thinking in those terms when they take their lives (Anthony Bourdain comes to mind regarding leaving his daughter behind) but yeah, it was really shocking to me. I feel for those two and I hope that the whole family circles around them, supports them and protects them. They had a front row seat to how unraveled their mother really was, more so than we ever even saw through her writing. It must've been a rollercoaster and then it ends this way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please correct me if I am wrong, but is she the blogger who shared the story of being after her husband when he was still married to someone else?

Indeed. And she dated a married man after she got divorced.

Oh wait, the young guy was married?? I missed that...

[Anonymous]

I lost interest in her blog after Chuck died.

I am shocked GOMI is still around!

Sometimes DCUM is like GOMI lite--all this hate for poor people, fat people, etc. It is just as gross.

[Anonymous]

I can't believe the terrible stuff people at GOMI are writing about this. Well, I can. Includes stuff like "good riddance," "her memory will never be a blessing," "she was also an a$$hole." Don't hold back, guys.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/evil-comment-site-gomi-trashed-blogger-heather-armstrong-in-life-and-death/ar-AA1b7mv1

All these "confused" posters on GOMI wondering why people are making any kind of connection between Armstrong having a hard time and their posting sh)t about Armstrong for years. They can't seem to figure out how their comments might have affected her, or why people might be thinking its gross to saw this stuff about people with problems.

It's just a puzzle, I can't figure it out!

[Anonymous]

Her ex husband has created a fundraiser for the kids college. I thought she had a lot of money

[Anonymous]

I hope her kids can find peace in their lives. And I am sad for Heather, who at least in the moment of her death, could not.