I only knew Dooce through her infamy as the first per­son to suf­fer real-life con­se­quences for things she wrote online. It’s hard for me to be inter­est­ed in the life of any­one I don’t know per­son­al­ly (excep­tions made for peo­ple I feel inspired by or am crush­ing on), and the hand­ful of times in twen­ty years that I was curi­ous enough to vis­it her web­site, I was met with some enter­tain­ing writ­ing about mar­riage and moth­er­hood that I could­n’t give a fuck about.

The last time would have been a few years ago; I tend to check up on a few blog­gers every so often when I’m won­der­ing how the land­scape has evolved¹. As one of the few who were pop­u­lar enough to make a liv­ing off the wit­ty rev­e­la­tions of per­son­al details, she eas­i­ly made the list. That’s why it was so dis­con­cert­ing to find that some months there was a sin­gle post, and the post was a list of spon­sored links to things peo­ple could buy. It was espe­cial­ly strange to find her dis­cussing diges­tive issues while a giant ban­ner would fight for my atten­tion under­neath: “And for any­one who may be expe­ri­enc­ing what I am, ButcherBox is run­ning a spe­cial pro­mo­tion through the end of the month where new mem­bers receive ground beef in every box for the life­time of their sub­scrip­tion.”

How much of her writ­ing was gen­uine? How do I trust the words of a per­son who seems to be cap­i­tal­iz­ing on her mis­for­tune?

Perhaps that’s why I was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly moved when I found out she com­mit­ted sui­cide two months ago. It felt like I nev­er knew who she tru­ly was beneath the curse words and prod­ucts being hawked. I also have a hard time empathiz­ing with any­one who would describe preg­nan­cy as an “end­less trove of con­tent”. For me, that kind of mind­set reeked too much of melo­dra­ma, which I find dis­taste­ful enough to avoid in real life.

It glads my heart when I stum­ble across anoth­er online diary nowa­days. A gen­uine one, of course, not updates from a com­pa­ny or a cook­ing blog that’s stuffed with pho­tos to pad the time some­one stays on the page before the recipe is found. No one enter­tains the same audi­ence as they used to, and I much pre­fer that to the kind of inter­ac­tive “con­fes­sion­al” Dooce had, or the social media influ­encers of today.

I’m remind­ed of how for­tu­nate I am to still have this lit­tle cor­ner of the web to express myself, a place where I’m not behold­en to any read­ers for a source of income. So often I find myself too bro­ken to get out of bed, too strung out to pur­sue my projects, too busy to find 15 min­utes to work on a lick. And dur­ing the stretch­es of time when I’m recov­er­ing and there’s noth­ing note­wor­thy to talk about, I’m relieved I don’t have to man­u­fac­ture expe­ri­ences to keep any­one’s atten­tion. I still get mail ask­ing if there are any spots for adver­tis­ing or avail­abil­i­ty for spon­sored posts, and they all get prompt­ly get filed away in the trash.

1. Also a good way for me to keep abreast on the lat­est web tech­nolo­gies. [↩]