Heather Armstrong has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Interestingly, this article glosses over some of the struggles she had in recent years (according to her blog) with drugs and an eating disorder. From her writing it was clear that she was in a lot of pain, and was trying desperately (including undergoing electroshock therapy) to find relief. I’m sorry that, after so many years of struggle, it ended like this.
Dooce may not be as ubiquitous as it once was, but as I type this her death is front-page news on the NYT, The Guardian[1], and CNN. She was truly, uniquely influential and her voice will be missed.
1. This one talks a bit more about her struggles, for anyone who isn’t familiar: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/10/heather-arms...
Heather was an amazing writer, always humorous in the face of adversity. Sometimes, over the years, I feel fortunate that we had a few e-mail exchanges too. She was always so open and honest, and appreciated random readers of her blog writing in and appreciating her pictures of putting objects on top of her dog, her other more artistic photography, and her ability to share an honest and strong approach to the world. My thoughts are with her family. Depression is such a silent, damaging disease. Such brilliant minds lost way too early.
I started reading her in 2001, just when I was founding my first startup. When she got fired in 2002 she _was_ the zeitgeist.
Public service announcement — dealing with childhood trauma is a monster. She covered it with alcohol, like many people do. If you’re struggling with trauma, get help. It’s not cognitive. You can’t solve it on your own.
I feel for her family, and wish them well. So it goes.
It's clear she struggled with depression and some sort of compulsion to live in public in a painful, raw way, pretty much all her adult life. Like many people in her circumstances, she had a love-hate relationship with an audience that often abused her, but was also the source of her income. It's also clear that all of this took a turn for the worse recently. Less than a year ago she posted this rambling, semi-coherent rant that has since been scrubbed from her blog:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220811035913/https://dooce.com...
In it, she speaks about her history of mental illness, body dysphoria and attempted suicide. She also says some things about gender dysphoria: she objects to the fact that affirmation is the only treatment offered, is scornful of neo-pronouns, hints that she feels her non-binary children have been swept up in a social contagion, and praises the bravery of de-transitioners. Needless to say, people did not take this kindly, as the comments on her Instagram around this time shoes:
https://www.instagram.com/p/ChGWRv-JN2m/
She was subjected to an enormous torrent of self-righteous abuse by her fanbase in the wake of this. Podcasts were made, Reddit threads savaged her, Twitter did its sociopathic thing, and it dragged on for weeks and weeks.
I'm not saying her fanbase bullied her to death. But I am saying that the way she was treated surely didn't help.
...But it could be interpreted a different way, I think.
In that archived post, she writes "last year on August 31st, 2021, I attempted suicide" and "imagine experiencing suicidal ideation all day every day for the rest of your time on Earth. That's me."
Clearly the death-impulse long predates any bullying she might have received on account of that post.
And the post strikes a combative tone, doesn't it? It almost seems as though she were looking to generate controversy, intentionally. (Not that I disagree with her, but it should be obvious how the Reddit hivemind would react.) Sometimes picking a good fight can make you feel _alive._
Isn't responding or critiquing the ideas in a podcast, Reddit thread or a tweet exactly how a) the Internet, b) free speech, and c) liberal civil society are supposed to work?
One reason my own blogging has so little traction is that I have long had a personal policy of trying to weed out and actively ditch the kinds of negative attention women so frequently attract online. I want attention on my work, not on me per se.
I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to post good info without it going like it seems to have gone for her. Sure, she made good money, but at what price?
She sounds like she was miserable the entire time and ultimately died by her own hand rather than being able to use financial success to resolve her problems.
I'm resolving my problems. Maybe that means I'm too boring or something to ever be a commercially successful blogger or whatever. But it's a conscious choice and longstanding personal policy that my mental health and quality of life matter more than some kind of commercial success.
And I personally feel that when someone so unable to effectively address their personal problems makes "most influential" lists, it's likely not a good thing overall for the health of the world as a whole.
People who are so much drama tend to attract drama and promote drama without meaning to. They vent about a bad day and it ends up being some shitshow that comes back to bite them, not relief from their pain.
I don't say that as criticism of her. I say that as firsthand experience. People often like me but expect me to be at my best at all times and few people are compassionate or supportive when I'm the one in need of support.
A relationship to the public is not like private relationships and I think some people have trouble sorting that out and that fact can contribute to both popularity and an excess of negative and unwanted side effects accompanying their popularity.
I'm sorry she suffered so much and ultimately killed herself. Ideally, the world uses this story as a means to find better answers -- though I'm not holding my breath, frankly. The world often actively promotes such patterns and seems to punish people for trying to sort their problems.
A lot of people show up for the drama. It does something for them. And what it does to the author -- eh, "not my problem."
It's true that not enough space is given to de-transitioners, but much of the discourse focuses on the very, very, very tiny number of people who did it because they didn't have dysphoria rather than the vast majority who did it because the social stigma and difficulty with employment turned out to be worse than the dysphoria. Detransition is turned into a weapon against trans people when it should be something that exists at peace with the majority who transition and are happy with it.
The whole thing reaches an apparent fever pitch simply due to the volume of posts. The original poster is simply beset with negativity. The human mind is simply not psychologically capable of dealing with that kind of onslaught in a healthy way. Such a simple, innocuous phenomenon is at the root of it: I see something I disagree with and am compelled to respond. Nothing sinister is happening in the minds of those involved (at least for the vast majority).
But regardless of how odious the original tweet/post was, this is just not a productive way for us to conduct discourse. But how do you combat it? I don't have an answer.
For comparison, here’s an article from a fan: https://twitter.com/ejdickson/status/1656425063321677825 - or for the direct link, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/heathe... Not that the article is any less frank about it, but at least it addresses some other points.
And it’s not like there aren’t other posts from contemporaries to quote. There are, just search for them: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/1656344993995411456 for example.
This is more what I expected to read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/10/heather-a... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/10/heather...
I read the NYT because it's not written by fans.
Trading your privacy and dignity for likes and dollars seems like something that is tricky to sustain healthily.
I need a source for "lapsed mormon". It doesn't seem like something that the author should just be coming up with to describe her. Google turns up little.
There's this which has the term but doesn't say if she identified that way: https://www.forbes.com/2009/05/06/mom-advice-bloggers-techno...
"My friend Ashley was in charge of organizing the event and asked if I’d speak knowing that I had my name removed from the church rolls earlier this year."
"Lapsed" means left the church.
"Removed from church rolls" means left the church
GP seems to be making an argument for linguistic neutrality, that any term that means something is as good as any other term that means the same thing. The reply I linked expands on how the term "lapsed" is used, which shows that there are subtle differences in what it communicates...
"Lapsed" in my experience has a friendlier connotation than most other words we would to describe someone who no longer practices a religion.
Here we have someone who has not just stopped attending the church, but has chose to speak at events for others leaving the church, and took action to have her name removed from the rolls, etc.
So while some use "lapsed" to say "no longer actively practicing," and others reserve it for "having deliberately left"-- the nuances are immaterial. She fit all of these labels.
OK then, we're done here. Chao.
It might have been better to just say that directly... it would have saved everyone some time and energy, including you.
Unfortunately, we don't have an adjective for someone who is deliberately opposed to a religion in English that doesn't have an extremely negative connotation.
But yes, that is precisely why I don't use that term for myself. I didn't just drift away from the church, at first. Later on I drifted away from the lifestyle, but that was after I stopped going to church, and I stopped going to church because even after asking clergy and my family I couldn't resolve issues with my faith.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
Words such as "intelligent" and "wise" spring to mind, which aren't generally regarded as negative. ;)
Whether as a self description or used by others, it generally carries a connotation that having left the faith is a negative thing.
I agree that "former" is a more neutral term.
See also:
I did quitmormon as well, back in 2017. I actually regretted it and was even mad at quitmormon for a time for making it so easy, but I've been at a place where I no longer regret it for a couple of years. And I guess that is where I feel betrayed by the church. If not for Prop 8 and the 2015 policy and the more extreme tax dodges I could have a more relaxed take on it. I still do have a relaxed take on Mormonism.
> Armstrong was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but left the religion years ago.
I suppose my question is, why is it relevant to mention at all? Is it because Mormonism is less of a "mainstream" religion, so it deserves more mention than "former Catholic" or "lapsed Protestant"?
> She used to write a lot about leaving Mormonism and was very critical of it.
What you wrote is clearer, simpler and gives me a more accurate image.
At a basic level, you have to send a notarized letter to the corporation that owns the trademark "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (a virtual theocracy in Utah) demanding they remove you from their records. (cf: quitmormon.com)
At a human level, the congregations are geographically based with intense community defined within a geography and effectively-dead treatment to people outside the geography.
My parent's area has been a growth area for Utah Mormon transplants for years, so their congregation has split and moved several times. At a recent funeral for an old Boy Scout leader of mine, they remarked on how many people they hadn't seen in over a decade due to the congregation splits. I was frankly amazed -- dozens of these folks they were pointing out had been regular visitors to our home during my school years! To me it seemed strange that folks lived 10 minutes down the road, were great friends, camped together, shopped together, etc. but as soon as an imaginary line changed their friendship came to an end.
Now, when someone _willingly_ leaves Mormonism, it's often the case that their family shuns them, mistreats them, and otherwise reacts in fear and loathing, because it both signals to the intense social group that the family has failed to stay Mormon together and is a threat that makes people wonder why someone might leave. Source: personal experience, spouse experience, observed experience, reddit's mormon and exmormon subreddits.
When I left Mormonism, as a courtesy I let people know in a social media post. I received about 500 personal messages from people I knew. 90% were vilifying -- my own mother calling me "so smart it made me stupid", a uniquely East Texan insult I've come to learn -- 9% were interested, of which 8 out of 10 of those people eventually left themselves and with their families.
At the funeral I mentioned earlier, I was effectively a persona non grata. That's okay. I wasn't there for me. I was there to remember and honor a sweet man, one of the few who reached out then and later with compassion and tolerance despite not agreeing with my choice.
I believe there are a few other high-demand religions with similar institutional failings preventing freedom of thought and association, but I'll not call those out here, simply note that this isn't a unique phenomenon to Mormonism nor is it ubiquitous to religion generally.
If you read around the malpractice that happens with regulated therapists that have oversight and reporting requirements, you will be deeply sceptical about the absolute weapons that sell themselves as "coaches" and such. It's a great way for scammer to access incredibly vulnerable people and create exploitative relationships. Please seek help through reputable medically endorsed regulated providers.
Try to think of the most shameful, heartbreaking moment in your life, and then imagine reliving those feelings every day of your life.
It gets tiring.
When we reach that point, it's pretty much impossible to escape the singularity of self-centeredness, and we sometimes delude ourselves into thinking that "we're doing them a favor, because they are better off without us."
I have never encountered anyone close to someone that has killed themselves, that has ever thought they were "better off" without their friend/partner/parent/child.
It's completely devastating, and often triggers a corrosion of families and communities.
My heart breaks for her, and for those she left behind.