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BLOGGER HEATHER ARMSTRONG, KNOWN AS DOOCE TO FANS, DEAD AT 47

Leanne Italie10:21, May 11 2023
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The pioneering blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a
mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and
on social media, has died at 47.

Armstrong died by suicide, her boyfriend Pete Ashdown told The Associated Press,
saying he found her on Tuesday night (local time) at their Salt Lake City home.

Ashdown said Armstrong had been sober for over 18 months but had recently had a
relapse. He did not provide further details.



Armstrong, who had two children with her former husband and business partner,
Jon Armstrong, began Dooce in 2001 and built it into a lucrative career.



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She was one of the first and most popular mommy bloggers, writing frankly about
her children, relationships and other challenges.

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She parlayed her successes with the blog, on Instagram and elsewhere into book
deals, putting out a memoir in 2009, It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a
Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.

Armstrong appeared on Oprah and was on the Forbes list of most influential women
in media.



Peter Ashdown/AP
The pioneering blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a
mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and
on social media, has died at 47.

In 2012, the Armstrongs announced they were separating. They divorced later that
year. She began dating Ashdown, a former US senate candidate, nearly six years
ago. They lived together with Armstrong's children, 19-year-old Leta and
13-year-old Marlo. He has three children from a previous marriage who spent time
in their home as well.

Armstrong didn't hold back on Instagram and Dooce, the latter a name that arose
from her inability to quickly spell “dude” during online chats. Her raw,
unapologetic posts on everything from pregnancy and breastfeeding to homework
and carpooling were often infused with curses. As her popularity grew, so too
did the barbs of critics, who accused her of bad parenting and worse.

One of her posts on Dooce spoke of a previous victory over drinking.

“On October 8th, 2021 I celebrated six months of sobriety by myself on the floor
next to my bed feeling as if I were a wounded animal who wanted to be left alone
to die,” Armstrong wrote.

“There was no one in my life who could possibly comprehend how symbolic a
victory it was for me, albeit ... one fraught with tears and sobbing so violent
that at one point I thought my body would split in two. The grief submerged me
in tidal waves of pain. For a few hours I found it hard to breathe.”



She went on: “Sobriety was not some mystery I had to solve. It was simply
looking at all my wounds and learning how to live with them.”

In her memoir, she described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts
on pop culture with faraway friends. Within a year, her audience grew from a few
friends to thousands of strangers around the world, she wrote.

More and more, Armstrong said, she found herself writing about her personal life
and, eventually, an office job, and “how much I wanted to strangle my boss,
often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor”.

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Her employer found the site and fired her, she wrote. She took it down but
started back up again six months later, writing about her new husband,
Armstrong, and how unemployment had forced them to move from Los Angeles to her
mother's basement in Utah.

She was soon pregnant. The pregnancy offered “an endless trove” of content, she
wrote, “but I truly believed that I would give it all up once I had the baby.”


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She didn't, but chronicled her highs and lows as a new mother.

“I don't think I would have survived it had I not offered up my story and
reached out to bridge the loneliness," she wrote.

Armstrong was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but left
the religion years ago. She suffered chronic depression for much of her life,
according to her book.

In 2017, after the unravelling of her marriage, the internet star dubbed “the
queen of the mommy bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine took a tumble in
popularity.

Her depression grew worse, leading her to enrol in a clinical trial at the
University of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, according to an interview she
gave Vox. She was put in a chemically induced coma for 15 minutes at a time for
10 sessions.

“I was feeling like life was not meant to be lived,” Armstrong told Vox. "When
you are that desperate, you will try anything. I thought my kids deserved to
have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had tried all options
to be that for them.”


WHERE TO GET HELP

 * 1737, Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 to talk to a trained counsellor.

 * Anxiety New Zealand 0800 ANXIETY (0800 269 4389)

 * Depression.org.nz 0800 111 757 or text 4202

 * Lifeline 0800 543 354

 * Mental Health Foundation 09 623 4812, click here to access its free resource
   and information service.

 * Rural Support Trust 0800 787 254

 * Samaritans 0800 726 666

 * Suicide Crisis Helpline 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)

 * Yellow Brick Road 0800 732 825

 * thelowdown.co.nz Web chat, email chat or free text 5626

 * What's Up 0800 942 8787 (for 5 to 18-year-olds). Phone counselling available
   Monday-Friday, noon-11pm and weekends, 3pm-11pm. Online chat is available
   3pm-10pm daily.

 * Youthline 0800 376 633, free text 234, email talk@youthline.co.nz, or find
   online chat and other support options here.

 * If it is an emergency, click here to find the number for your local crisis
   assessment team.

 * In a life-threatening situation, call 111.





AP

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