For decades. What if I told you that rock bottom is actually the pinnacle of hope? What if I told you that rock bottom is the brightest light you have ever witnessed in your life?
Would you believe me? I hit rock bottom. I know the day. I know the exact time because I was looking at the clock in my car where I had slept all night. But I had slept in my car many, many nights before in the year leading up to that morning. Because we hurt the people in our lives when we abuse alcohol, we just do. And they are justifiably upset that we continue to hurt them. Often they lash out at us and want to hurt us in return because this is what humans do.
They are as human as we are. See how pernicious this disease is? It infects the lives of those around the person whose body it has invaded and aims to kill. I had not believed that there was a way out, so the only way I can explain this is to talk about it like I talk about music:. I was singing the low alto notes to a song I did not think my mother could hear.
Suddenly, as she was saying goodbye to me on the phone she stopped herself and whispered the soprano notes to the chorus of that song. The harmony almost deafened me, and light filled me like liquid gold being poured into the cast of a mythical hobbit that would one day be perched atop a mythical hobbit church.
It would face east because that is the direction from which the One Ring will fall out of the sky when it needs to cleanse the earth.
I think I got some mythologies confused. Blah, blah, blah, bible, god, Allah, meditation, Brahman, guru poop.
Whatever helps you triumph over alcohol is sacred. This is my religion. That hope? That light? That moment? It was no longer about being fine with the reality that alcohol would kill me. It was about living. I had not ever wanted to live without alcohol until I heard that harmony.
I had not ever believed that life without alcohol would be a life worth living. That morning I not only believed, I could not wait for it. My timeline began with hope and continues with it. I saw a way out and ran. I Usain Bolted outta that place. I made the decision that I would not ever go back into that basement room. That decision is not an ordinary choice. 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. Armstrong had spent years praising her husband as a hero who supported her through her mental illness. She had written that she loved what a good father he was, and that he was a good partner too. In reality, though, the couple had been in counseling for years. Jon Armstrong did not respond to requests for comment.
Do I want to do this to my kids? Do I want to do this to my career? Non-fans openly wrote that the news had made them gleeful. It led me from one unhealthy situation to the next. Armstrong now has custody of her two daughters for most of the year they spend summers with their father. Blogging started to fizzle out as a medium , and display advertising money dried up.
Dooce did have a somewhat diversified revenue stream; Armstrong started doing sponsored content as early as Brands would pay her for blog posts that promoted their products, but she says brand demands began to cross a line. The Dooce blog lived on for a bit after the divorce. Armstrong filled it with recipes, shopping guides, and tales of single parenthood. In , though, she announced she was taking a break. Armstrong says leaving the blog was refreshing — at least initially.
She went on international trips, booked speaking engagements, trained for a marathon, and began to do freelance marketing for an animal welfare nonprofit. Armstrong felt overwhelmed by the mundane tasks of laundry and carpool. Lifestyle bloggers like Armstrong made a career — a whole life, really — by sharing that life with others. They commodified their identities and experiences by offering their audience an authentic or at least authentic-seeming peek at their often enviable existence.
No matter how real Armstrong or any of her peers got, there was still an air of aspiration surrounding them. Perhaps the most prominent was evangelical mommy blogger Glennon Doyle of Momastery , who came out as gay and is now a social justice activist and best-selling author. But many of these bloggers found that instead of derailing their careers, sharing their experiences reinforced their authenticity to their core readership.
Armstrong returned to blogging full time in , after the experimental treatment eased her depression. She missed the act of writing, which had helped her process her feelings during the divorce. When she came back, she was pleasantly surprised to find that her most loyal fans were still there waiting. In the time that Armstrong had been absent from her site, bloggers had been almost wholly replaced with social media stars who relied on Instagram to gain a following.
Bloggers had risen to fame thanks to deeply personal posts; Instagram personalities operated in a much more visual medium, relying on photos of cute kids and beautiful homes for likes. Her following is small, at 50, followers, as opposed to mommy mega-influencer Rachel Parcell , at more than 1 million.
But when in Rome, right? Something has to pay the bills. Armstrong does sponsored work for FabFitFun and Hyundai on her blog and Instagram, and receives affiliate revenue from Stitch Fix and Amazon, earning a commission from shoppers who click through and buy recommended products.
In keeping with the times, she also has a podcast about single parenting, which is sponsored by Canidae Pet Food. Dooce is still about dental visits , therapy sessions , and life as an ex-Mormon. Ashdown walks in with groceries and starts to make fresh pasta for dinner.
She hovers over Ashdown as he wheels his dough through a pasta maker, and eventually moves on to her homework, which involves crafting The Very Hungry Caterpillar out of Play-Doh. She plops down on the living room sofa and plays with her iPhone, occasionally interjecting snappy one-liners into the conversation Armstrong and her mother are having about changes at the Mormon Church.
In the next iteration of her career, Armstrong hopes to focus on mental health and is interested in starting a mental health nonprofit. What does any of this have to do with fraud? Not much, other than Dooce is a fraudulent friend. When will people become smart enough to not get involved with her? I have always been surprised by those who take up a pitch fork ready to take down anyone just because she has said their bad people, without researching the information themselves.
Dooce reminds me of a friend of mine from college; my friend had horrible self-esteem and would sleep with anyone that propositioned her. This is really what you do with your free time? What a world. I really mean that. Thank you. Same here! Share this: Twitter Facebook. Is January Really Divorce Month?
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