So a lot of my peers thought I was the spawn of Satan. The Mormon community was very small, so I had a very small group of friends at church. And not only was I Mormon, but I was also awkwardly skinny and a total perfectionist, and I had a constant frown on my face.
I took things way, way, way too seriously. I was not well liked. Armstrong : The last time I was in Memphis was for my ten-year high-school reunion in Armstrong : Absolutely. I come from a very Southern family, and we all sit around for hours and talk. And I miss the South so much sometimes. I was in Knoxville last November for [meetings with] HGTV, and it rained for three days, and every single person that I ran into apologized for the fact that it was raining.
Are you at all drawn to fiction, or to reporting? Would you ever write, say, a book about natural childbirth? Armstrong : Maybe. I cannot make up a story to save my life. But nonfiction, maybe. Chapter 16 : Do you have a plan for how the blog might change when Leta is old enough to object to what you post about her? Armstrong : I plan to stay on top of it.
I already ask her if I can take her picture and post it, and I read to her the things that I write about her. It is not about choosing my kids or my partner or all the good things about my life over alcohol. That choice is waking up each morning and taking a pill for my deadly disease.
The most important part about the timeline, though, is also the most critical thing the people in your life need to know:. When we are slaves to a substance we are not choosing that substance. In fact, that substance has robbed us of any belief that a choice exists.
It has rewired our brains. Try and reduce us to a choice all you want, but no one will never come close to making us feel as low as we already feel. No one will ever be as good at shaming us as we are at feeling ashamed of ourselves.
We need someone to turn to when we Find Our Ready. This is what I call it. You have to find it and want it and hold in in your hands and press it to your chest because it is more valuable than the Ark of the Covenant. If we must use jargon in our journey through recovery, I propose that we trash the phrase Rock Bottom and replace it with Finding Your Ready. I know, it sounds exactly like Guru Poop.
I understand, You Who Needs Me, that you may not have The Enabler in your life who can say the right thing or sing the right song or trip the wire that got tripped for me that morning, that moment in my car. I understand that a lot of us who make it out of that room often run back to it, and I understand why we do and why we would want to. I am not the other shoe certain people are waiting to be dropped. I am Heather B. I am not better nor am I stronger than any of those people. I am my own person.
My name is my name. My power is my power. Never again will I allow it to say my name. I do not remember what it was like to want to drink. I do not remember what it was like to wake up and immediately reach for the bottle in my purse next to the bed. Maybe life with them now is effortless and peaceful. All of my senses including my sense of space have been turned to This is a literal description.
White knuckle days for me are echo chambers of existential reckoning. But the really good news is that life is brimming with joy. I believed that I would not be able to experience any pleasure in life without alcohol when the truth was that alcohol had wiped the true memory of pleasure from my brain.
Understanding this lie and being able to examine this lie with a sober mind filled me with rage, with an anger so hot that it grew blue in color. I give credit to this fury for my resolve. I read your question and without hesitating I sat down to tell you about my experience. I sat down to tell you specifically that even though some unspeakable things happened this week I am still so happy that I am sober. Pain has not once in the last days tempted me to turn to alcohol.
And suddenly, I was writing. I was bleeding words. You have no idea how scared I was that would never again be able to sit still. I was terrified I would never be able to write again. Alcohol was certain it would never let me get here in front of this keyboard. It did not want me to talk to you. I told my mom that I wanted to thank you, a stranger, for tripping that wire for me. You have no idea the gift you have given me.
This is the first time I have written or typed out this nickname, and doing so shot my sober, frog leg brain straight back to where it wanted to dwell and suction cup itself onto every color and smell of the following memory:.
Confusion causes alcoholism. You read it here first. And oh my god, because of my Sober Frog Leg Brain I just this second found the perfect name for what is going on in the contorted circuitry of your mind during the first four months of sobriety.
Good times, that story. A brief, non-Sober Frog Leg Brain synopsis of this good times story:. A very public misunderstanding happened in downtown San Francisco on July 19, I turned 33 years old that day.
Someone else almost lost her life to her alcoholism. Period, no question mark. Guess what! Turns out drugs are very different and surprisingly awesome when you are not participating in their realm while drunk.
How do I know this? A friend told me! Good thing that friend lives in a state where medicinal marijuana is legal because she can use it when she starts to experience a crippling panic attack.
That time has arrived. I aim to please. My cousin once got so constipated that he passed out in the bathroom at work remember this story? His head bounced and that caused his body to roll over. He woke up with his bare butt sticking out from underneath the stall. And he has no idea if anybody walked in while he was unconscious. My mother would never ask anyone to hold her beer she prefers whiskey.
She was born and raised in Kentucky within spitting distance of the Bourbon Trail. And she takes fucking notes. Please do continue reading. Please, if you are worried about someone close to you and feel that inserting yourself this way will help them, I beg you to hire a professional or a team of professionals.
Please do not do it without a trained interventionist in the room with you. If an intervention helped you overcome your substance abuse, I am thrilled for you and would celebrate that with you.
Armstrong lives on a quiet, leafy street in Salt Lake City, at the bottom of the snow-capped Wasatch mountain. She shares a home with her boyfriend Pete Ashdown , an early internet mogul and fellow ex-Mormon, and her two daughters, year-old Leta and 9-year-old Marlo. Armstrong is tall, thin, and blonde — precisely the stereotype of a successful blogger. She curses often and exaggerates frequently. This is why she recently published her third book, The Valedictorian of Being Dead, a raw account of her experience with depression and how the trial at the University of Utah helped her recover.
Armstrong has struggled with depression since college. But she also believes the major depressive episode she experienced two years ago was likely a consequence of sharing her life online so publicly, and for so long. It became untenable. Born Heather Hamilton, Armstrong grew up in the Mormon Church but started having doubts about religion in college.
She officially left the church after graduating from Brigham Young University in , moving to Los Angeles to pursue a new secular life. It was the era of the first dot-com boom, and she learned HTML and took jobs as a developer, writing code for startups. A year after she started the blog, in , Armstrong was fired after coworkers found out she was writing about them on her blog. They reconnected through mutual friends living in California, and soon moved back to Salt Lake City to start a family.
When Armstrong gave birth to her daughter Leta in , Dooce became all about being a mom. But her blog resonated with a large and diverse audience because it offered unfiltered encounters with motherhood. The only way to describe it to a man is to suggest that he lay out his naked penis on a chopping block, place a manual stapler on the sacred helmut head, and bang in a couple hundred staples.
She also wrote about the bad. Six months after Leta was born, Armstrong informed readers she had voluntarily checked into a psychiatric ward because she was struggling with postpartum depression. These instincts have turned into demons that terrorize me from the moment I get out of bed. Armstrong was just as candid about marriage as she was about motherhood.
She described her dynamic with Jon as a quirky one, in which the duo drove each other mad but were still in love and in it together for the long run. She also wrote how lucky she felt to have a partner who stuck with her through depression. This is not easy. Dooce seemed authentic to readers, so many of whom were also moms, and a community was born. Armstrong was a constant presence in the comments section and wrote regular posts on the site to answer reader-submitted questions. Mundane stories about finding a raccoon in a chimney and buying new kitchen appliances drew in audiences, but it was the honesty and humor with which Armstrong wrote about parenting that was most compelling to readers.
Dooce was also one of many blogs written by Mormon women. In the late aughts , many educated Mormon women who had gotten married and had children young turned to blogging for both income and fulfillment. The religion practically primed them for the job too, according to Armstrong, since Mormons are taught to journal from a young age, and focus on creative hobbies like crafting and sewing, which was blogging gold for the booming DIY trend. These Mormon bloggers, among other women, paved the way for a massive, lucrative industry through platforms like BlogHer.
When Armstrong began putting ads on her blog in , though, she recalls a firestorm of criticism. By , Dooce was such a thriving business that it was able to support a staff of five: Armstrong, her husband Jon, an assistant, and two babysitters. Jon Armstrong joked to the Times Magazine that while having their second child, Marlo, had been good for business, the hostility toward Dooce proved to be an even better moneymaker.
Trolls flooded Armstrong with hate mail and angry comments, and started blogs of their own to pick apart Dooce. She was a constant subject of conversation on GOMI , a website with forums dedicated to trash-talking lifestyle bloggers , and on the Blogsnark subreddit. The internet has always bred hate, but it was also a different place back then. People felt entitled to have an opinion about her. Despite all the hate, Armstrong felt her readers were worth it.
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