It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m still working on this website instead of my deadlines today (the remote freelancer life, amirite), and I was trying to figure out what intelligent, insightful thing I should be writing for this blog, so I decided to go to Dooce.com, a blog I haven’t visited in quite a while, and see what Heather Armstrong is up to these days.

I used to visit her blog a lot in the 2000s. I loved how raw and open her writing was. And she had a huge impact on blogging; everyone knew what getting Dooced meant, and she was a mommy blogger and making sponcon long before influencers were even a thing.

I saw that her last post was in April 2023. That didn’t seem strange at first, because a lot of bloggers from the 2000s are usually found on Instagram or Substack these days.

And then I Googled her and found out that she died in May 2023. It’s a gut punch to read about how it happened.

I don’t have an eloquent belated tribute for her. I was just a very sporadic onlooker in her life and someone who hoped to write about life in a way that’s half as authentic as she did. I hadn’t kept up with her the way I did decades ago, so I don’t know about any controversies she might have been involved with, so I will just remember her as the pioneer that she was.

I started blogging in 1999, back when blogs were still known as weblogs and online journals and Blogger was cutting edge. It was so cutting edge I was afraid of nicking myself and thus opted to just manually update and reupload HTML pages on my personal website, wherever it was hosted. My online heroes included Christine of Maganda.org, Claire of Loobylu, and Heather of Harrumph and Jezebel (which incidentally became one of my favorite websites in the 2010s, though it was completely different from the site Heather ran). I wanted to be as creative and as good with words as they were, and thought that whatever I wrote deserved to curl up and cry in a corner when compared to what they posted.

Eventually, I found a community of fellow online journalers, and many of us made our way to Livejournal, which used to require an invite from a friend before you could join. Once I received that elusive invite, I proceeded to vomit all over my journal and most likely caused eyes to weld to the back of heads with all my drama.

Once I started working, the urge to blog tapered off, and when I wasn’t looking, blogging exploded. People were cultivating loyal readerships and making money from blogging. Soon, food blogs, travel blogs, shopping blogs, beauty blogs, parenting blogs, green blogs, gadget blogs were everywhere. I wanted to have any one of those and often regretted giving up blogging.

Trying to figure out my unique niche (ew) and worrying about being cringe have forced me to stop blogging for years. As I got older, I realized that, truly, most of the time, you’re the only one who gets in your way, and you just end up doing absolutely nothing, and life’s really just too short to keep yourself stuck. So here I go again.