dooce

I wanted to be like her in a way. I wanted to write about my life like she wrote about hers—in a way that people found interesting. 

I loved her take on her life, the lens she saw it through. 

I loved her words, her drawl, her cadences. 

She was droll and quirky. 

She was sarcastic. 

She was just wicked funny.

She also had a fine photographer’s and designer’s eye. She set her living/work scene and filmed her life. 

And I loved Chuck, her dog. 

She would balance objects on his doggy head and then take a picture of him posing. She posted a picture-of-the-day section called, The Daily Chuck with Chuck in all his zany get-ups.

When Chuck died I cried buckets. 

We all did.

Two days ago, she committed suicide. 

I wasn’t shocked, but I was gutted.

I could sense the few times I looked at her blog in the last year that her life had taken on a new fragility. 

It was hard for me to reconcile her old self with this new edgier, troubled version.

She wasn’t spinning her life anymore, either. She seemed to be documenting it instead. 

Her life looked sad. 

Still glamorous, but sad.

Curated. Not cute.

It’s a funny thing about blogs. The most popular ones are those where the blogger has a big problem, or a small annoying one, and writes about it. 

Those blogs read like soap operas. You get hooked because you care about this person, her kids, and her dog—the one that balances things on its head— and you must know what happens next in her life. 

When she had her first child, she went through postpartum depression that turned into just regular depression, which turned into alcoholism. 

And she wrote about it. She made herself vulnerable.

She had over a million readers.

She made a lot of money. She was a six-figure, mommy-blogger-influencer. She was on a Forbes List.

But then, when you discover that demons haunt this person you want to be, it makes you wonder.

You want to be like her, sure, but without those big hairy problems. 

But ironically, it’s her problems and her honesty talking about them, that draws you in, makes you care about her.

You cry when her dog dies, and then feel gutted when, on some random Wednesday in May, you open the NY Times and find that she killed herself at age 47.

This person you never knew, but feel like you really did, and who you envied, and wanted to be like, is dead and you feel kinda wrecked.  

But she was just a blogger.

I was telling this to Linda today as we walked out of the gym. She said she thinks blogs are— and she said this very emphatically: A “Waste Of Time.” 

“I don’t even read your blog,” she said, kind of proudly. 

But I know for sure that if she wrote a blog I would definitely read it. 

In fact, I would love it if everyone I knew wrote a blog, just so I could know more about their lives and what they were doing, thinking about, and struggling with.

I’d want to see pics of their pets or their kitchens or their gardens, too. I’d want to see how they spin it. 

I’m certain it would make me care about them in a completely new and deeper way.

And this is what I want in my life: more and deeper connections.

I realize some people might say the stuff they post on social media functions like a blog for them. You know, all those pictures of parties and puppies.

 But they’d be wrong. 

Social media posts are like billboards you whiz past going 70.

With a blog you have to sit down and read the damn thing. They’re like having a coffee with someone as opposed to just beeping and waving as you pass on the road.

A relationship can often build between a blogger and a reader. We come to care about each other. A blogger with a reader feels connected to that reader even if they never comment, or make their presence known in any way. They  show up in the reader numbers. 

The blogger feels seen. 

The reader can relate.

We become invested in each other’s happiness in some weird way.

I don’t know what this blog is. It’s not a soap opera, that’s for sure. I have lots of boundaries, and I have trouble being truly open and vulnerable so it’s never going to go viral or be read by a lot of people. 

Mainly because it’s boring.

But boring is my life. So what I like to do is pick one little boring doo-dad out of the pile, shine it up and post it on the internet, and in do doing have the internet  keep track of my life. 

So even though Linda’s probably right and this is a waste of time,  I seem to want to do it anyway. 

So I will.

RIP dooce.

I will miss you.