I was at the office yesterday, preparing for a conference in Houston when the texts came in. Dooce dead. Sucker punch.
You might be saying to yourself, “Who/what the fuck is Dooce?” But to paraphrase my friend, Emma, if you were a certain kind of woman on a certain part of the internet in the oughties, Dooce was like Elvis. Her blog, Dooce.com, was epic, honest and searing. A reflection of who we were in that era. You might even say she was the first real influencer, amassing $40K a month from ads by 2009, getting a book deal, and appearing on Oprah.
On a Saturday in May 2004, I was at the office of a big specialty network TV broadcaster I ran websites for, prepping for a three-week, Amazing Race-type adventure in Scandinavia with my then-husband. I didn’t know I had ADHD then, so trying to get ahead on three weeks of work meant I had to put in extra time. In the days of the toddler Internet, I would frequently pop open tabs to read blogs in between tasks, which inevitably made everything take longer as I went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. But I was also there to be alone with my thoughts.
I had peed on a stick a few days earlier, after a week of drinking and partying, where I suddenly did not feel good at all and Veuve Cliquot tasted like piss. I was unexpectedly pregnant, and the books I hastily bought in Indigo all gave the world’s worst advice: That I should keep it to myself for 12 weeks lest I miscarried and would have to tell people. (Why the eff do we do that? That’s a whole ‘nother post.) But I had to put my anxiousness and excitement somewhere, so I popped open a site called Blogger.com and created my first blog, Martinis for Milk. In just a week, I had traded my Sex and the City Cosmos for standing outside the Metro at College and Crawford, desperately guzzling cartons of milk while Portuguese ladies gave me side-eye. It fit.
Months later, I was on mat leave with my sweet baby boy — a reprieve from a work culture that had gone from great to super sour and stressful — when my good friends and colleagues said they saw my entire blog printed off on my boss’s desk. I googled, “Can you get fired for your blog?” and landed at Dooce.com. If it happened to you, chances were good that it happened to Dooce too. The difference was she had the balls to write about it. Unfortunately, that came at a cost.
Heather B. Armstrong’s blog was irreverent, honest, and funny AF. She talked about leaving the Mormon faith and her colleagues and having margaritas at lunch. When she got pregnant, she began to write about the Yin-Yang of motherhood, from post-partum depression and the pain of breastfeeding to the beauty of the little moments. The NYT called her the “mommy of all mommy bloggers” and I don’t think there is a single one of us from that era that would argue with that. She was on Oprah and we all tuned in. She was at BlogHer in San Francisco in 2008, and I left my 10-month-old nursing infant to fly down there to see her speak.
She also struggled deeply with seemingly untreatable depression. As the most prominent woman sharing her life openly on the internet at that time, she was subject to much hate. She herself admitted the toll, something we often hear now as influencers snap under pressure. Back then, entire sites spun up to snarkily discuss the nuances of her words and what that meant. Trainwreck, they said, while rubber-necking.
For me, after a decade of blogging several times a week, I had to stop. While at its peak I would get several thousands of readers a month, there was a price to pay. I could see where it was taking me. My need for validation. My marriage crumbling on the screen, my loyalty to my readers impacting how I chose to trespass the boundaries of our union. And, truth be told, after Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram sprung up, we were all diffused. There were too many places to share thoughts, words, and images. There were too many communities to participate in and attend to. Too many guest books to sign. Too many cliques. We were all giving so much of ourselves as digital serfs. How to decide where to put one’s limited attention and energy?
Blogs are where I learned how to write. The writing mattered — a lot. I don’t know what has happened to writing and reading since 2008, the dawn of Facebook. There are certainly people smarter than me writing about the rewiring of our brains and the rise of individualism and its impact on society. But I can say with some certainty that social media killed the blog star. As of yesterday, quite precisely.
Yesterday, we “OG bloggers” texted each other in sadness. I am off social media so I missed the inevitable awkwardness of folks sharing photos of having met Dooce or being in that elite circle of bloggers at that time, but my besties shared links and screenshots so I could follow along. Dooce had become a bit TERFY of late, and still, we were sad because, to paraphrase my pal, Marla, much like loving Morrissey, you can know someone is problematic and still feel love for their creations that connected you with yourself.
What those of you who did not participate in that cozy corner of the internet might not know is what a balm it was to read about other women struggling with motherhood. To read about the pain of giving up oneself to birth and raise a human in a society that doesn’t value us, except once a year on Mother’s Day when we get a handmade card. To have parts of yourself and your experience reflected back to you. The depth of the friendships we created in those days in a sort of trauma bond, many of which continue to this day. The drama, oh, the drama. As usual, Dooce did it best. Mic drop. Perhaps there’s nothing left to be said.
I long for the days when it felt like we had more time for each other. Trapped on our couches with sleeping babies at night, we never felt alone because we had blogs and each other. (And later, Twitter, where you could be funny and brief and what you looked like mattered not.) Last week Buzzfeed News died too. And now the internet of the turn of the century is officially over. What started as one person in their home furiously typing their thoughts so we could reflect back to each other that, yes, this current reality wasn’t all we were told it would be, turned into a hall of mirrors. Our reflections are refracted, distorted, and manipulated. Our attention and connections, fragmented. Atomized. There’s nothing digital to grab onto anymore. None of it feels real.
The price of Dooce’s quest for truth was Heather herself. I know I’m usually an optimistic Pollyanna but today I’m just sad. Our desire to see the mighty fall is our worst trait. We can’t have nice things because we judge so harshly and use things up without considering the long-term effects. We let our envy burn us up rather than use it to tap into what possibilities may exist for us too. We say, “Well, if you choose to be famous, you have to deal with the consequences,” rather than turning towards each other in kindness and accepting the truth: We’re all human and, therefore fragile, vulnerable.
Rest well, Dooce.
And to the woman who used to google her way to Martinis for Milk via the search term, “the baby is crying and my husband is at work and I just want to crawl in a hole and smoke a cigarette,” I’m so glad blogs existed for you. For all of us.