May 18, 2023
On Mess
A blog post is always self-referential, even when it isn’t. The nature of blogging is that the blogger is always writing about herself.
(I think one could argue that this is true with any literary form, but with blogging it’s essential.)
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I never read Dooce, though I got very into reading blogs at the same time her blog blew up, and I’ve been writing mine as long as she was. But she was a few years older than me, and I was in a different place during those few years where she was writing raw from the trenches of motherhood, a place where her words wouldn’t have registered. And then by the time I had children of my own (and yes, to quote her memoir, it sucked and I cried), she had become slick and branded, and so I never got to see myself in her story, as so many other women did.
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I once read an entire book about the history of blogging that only mentioned a woman once, and it was a co-founder of Blogger who runs out of a meeting in tears.
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Heather Armstrong made me uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons. You’d think that as someone who has also tried to tell the truth about motherhood, embraced online platforms for self-expression, struggled with mental health, and supports women telling their stories that I would have more compassion and empathy for her experience, but I struggle with this. I struggle with messy people. I like to imagine there are rules to be followed and that things generally work out for people who do, which is my own problem. I note how coverage of Armstrong over the years has tried to fit her into a narrative with a tidy beginning, middle and end, but she kept escaping these confines, kept being too much. I think of how we praise people for daring to tell their truths but then they keep going and we’re all, “Oh, no, not that truth. I don’t like that one.”
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Armstrong’s life and death have a lot to say about the limits of personal storytelling. Did it prolong her life, or might she have been healthier without it? Without a platform to perform on, would she have been less narcissistic? But aren’t people with such tendencies always going to find a platform somewhere anyway, online or otherwise? Did it turn her into a character, a caricature?
I think a lot about my fervent believe that personal storytelling was going to save the world, that blogging (and mommy blogs especially) were a radical act. But the world is decidedly not a kinder, friendlier or safer place for women, for mothers, than it was 20 years ago when blogs were new.
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I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Heather Armstrong died. I’d checked out her social media from time to time, and it was clear that she was struggling. She kept posing for pictures on her porch looking terribly thin, and it bugged me. I’m not saying this was justified, but this is how it was. That this person who was famous for the hugeness of her truth telling, for her audacity and nerve, was literally skin and bones, withering down to nothing, and posing for these pictures to which people responded by telling her, OMG, you look amazing.
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But when I say “I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Heather Armstrong died,” I’m doing it again, putting stock in those rules. That this is what happens, logical outcomes. She had it coming. That narrative is inevitable. I’m trying to control the mess, apply my own kind of sense to it.
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“But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality– dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers,” said Dorothy Parker.
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Maybe this is the problem of making any one person an emblem—of womanhood, of motherhood—when it’s hard enough being one single human. Of how women are expected to faultless, never misstep. Can a blogger ever really stand for anything except her self?
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Part of the tension too is that we see ourselves in these women, our real and most authentic selves, but then they also show us our worst selves too, even when we don’t pick up on it directly. And then they also reflect their own selves, the parts of them that are nothing like us at all, and the effect of all of this is uncanny, the familiar rendered strange. How we want everything to be relatable and the gap becomes a chasm when it isn’t.
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I want to admire people for daring to unlikable. Part of that deal, of course, however, is that I’m not obligated to like them.
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I personally have such a hard time with the notion that a person can be a mess and that this is just okay. That a person can fail to follow the rules and still be worthy of love and compassion, even if there isn’t a fix. And I want to fix, I want to fix. For me compassion is the desire to fix, and I’d like to train my mind to get to a more generous place, a place for grace.
