Heather B. Armstrong

A few weeks ago I hopped on the phone with Heather Wood Rudulph of Cosmopolitan to talk about the history of dooce^® and where I'm headed next for their "Get That Life" series.

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"As a web designer, you're constantly looking for inspiration online. And part of what I browsed were LiveJournals and blogs. There weren't that many at the time. Many of them were basically résumés or galleries of things people created, paired with an anecdote about their life. I thought, I can build one of those. It was going to be like my own little online magazine about living in L.A. that I would send out to 12 of my friends."

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"I had very severe postpartum depression after my daughter was born, and I wrote about it very carefully. It was so debilitating that I ended up in the hospital. I remember trying to balance in my head — and this is what's so fucked up about living your life online like this — that I needed to go to the hospital, but I was so terrified that the people who read my website would label me as that crazy lady who ended up in a psych ward. I checked myself into the hospital for four days, wrote about it, and my traffic did another spike."

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"I think the term 'mommy blogger' is a little dismissive. But that label is not something I can get rid of. I've embraced it because what we did — a lot of women who were in the first guard of bloggers — was created a community in which to feel safe. We helped raise each other's kids, we comforted each other, and we gave voice to women who are so easily dismissed as "just a stay-at-home mom." We supported each other and stood up to say our stories were important. I mean, who the hell is going to hire a mom in Salt Lake City to write stories about parenthood and pay her a lot of money? But they didn't have to hire me. I hired myself."

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"I grew up always wanting to be a teacher, and I think it's time. I've got 18 years of experience online, and, oh, the stories I have to tell, the insight I have to share. I want to speak and consult and help others navigate this ever-changing landscape. Because I've done everything right, and I've done everything wrong."

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Photo credit Chad Kirkland who was one of the most fabulous photographers I've ever worked with.

Food blogger Adam Roberts wrote last month about why he parted ways with his ad company, why "food blogging" as a career became impossible:

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"I realized I could no longer rely on food blogging to be my sole source of income. That sentence is funny to re-read because could anyone ever really rely on food blogging as a sole source of income? Well, at the beginning it wasn’t clear; and for a while, it seemed possible (supplemented with book deals and TV shows and magazine columns, if you could swing it). But now the writing’s on the wall: to do this full-time, you’ve either got to be wildly successful or you’ve got to be a shill. I’m not the former, for a while I was (uncomfortably) the latter, but now I have to stake out a new path as a food blogger and that’s what I’m trying to figure out."

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Via Kottke, who thinks I'm retiring. Now, If I read what I wrote correctly, I think it says (and stop me if I'm wrong), "I have no intention of shutting this space down. There are too many memories in these pages, and frankly, I still like to write stories." You will read so many persepctives on what happens when you make your passion your living, and I will not wax poetic about that now. What I will say will reveal my privilege in just one of its many disgusting shapes: when you take a look at your DSLR camera and think, "I cannot possibly take another photo of my dog," you've hit one magnificently ridiculous wall.