NEW YORK (AP) — Heather Armstrong, a pioneering mommy blogger who documented her struggles with depression and alcoholism as well as her struggles as a mother, has passed away at the age of 47. Armstrong kicked the bucket by self destruction, her beau Pete Ashdown told The Related Press, saying he found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home.

Ashdown said Armstrong had been level-headed for north of year and a half yet had as of late had a backslide. He didn’t give further subtleties. Armstrong, who had two kids with her previous spouse and colleague, Jon Armstrong, started Dooce in 2001 and incorporated it into a worthwhile profession.

She wrote openly about her children, relationships, and other challenges, making her one of the first and most popular mommy bloggers. She published a memoir in 2009 titled “It Sucked and then I Cried:” after turning her blog, Instagram, and other success into book deals. How I Had a Child, a Breakdown and a Truly necessary Margarita.”

Armstrong showed up on Oprah and was on the Forbes rundown of most compelling ladies in media. In 2012, the Armstrongs declared they were isolating. Later that year, they got divorced. She started dating Ashdown, a previous U.S. senate competitor, almost a long time back. They shared a home with Leta, who was 19 years old, and Marlo, who was 13. From a previous marriage, he has three children who also spent time in their home.

Armstrong didn’t hold back when it came to Instagram or Dooce, the latter of which was given to her because she couldn’t quickly spell “dude” in online chats. Curses were frequently sprinkled throughout her candid, unapologetic posts about everything from homework to carpooling and breastfeeding to pregnancy.

As her fame developed, so too did the thorns of pundits, who blamed her for terrible nurturing and more regrettable. She mentioned a previous victory over drinking in one of her posts on Dooce. On October eighth, 2021 I celebrated a half year of moderation without anyone else on the floor close to my bed feeling as though I were an injured creature who needed to be let be to pass on,” Armstrong composed. ” No one in my life could possibly comprehend how symbolic a victory it was for me, despite the fact that it was accompanied by violent crying and tears to the point where I thought my body would break. I was submerged in waves of pain by the grief.

I had trouble breathing for a few hours. She went on: ” I didn’t have to figure out how I got sober. Observing all of my wounds and learning to live with them was all that was required. She explained in her memoir how she started her blog as a way to talk to friends far away about her thoughts on pop culture. She wrote that in a year, her audience expanded from a few friends to thousands of strangers worldwide.

According to Armstrong, she began writing more and more about her personal life and, eventually, her office job. She also wrote about “how much I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor,” he said. She wrote that her employer discovered the website and fired her. She took it down, but six months later she started writing again about her new husband, Armstrong, and how they had to move from Los Angeles to her mother’s basement in Utah because of unemployment. She was soon pregnant.

She wrote that although the pregnancy provided her with “an endless trove” of content, she “truly believed that I would give it all up once I had the baby.” She didn’t, but she did write about her ups and downs as a new mom.

She wrote, “If I hadn’t offered up my story and reached out to bridge the loneliness, I don’t think I would have survived it.” Armstrong was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all his life, but he has since left the faith. Her book says that she had chronic depression for a lot of her life. The internet star dubbed “the queen of the mommy bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine experienced a decline in popularity in 2017 following the breakup of her marriage.

According to an interview she gave to Vox, her depression got worse, so she signed up for a clinical trial at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of Utah.

She was placed in a synthetically prompted extreme lethargies for 15 minutes all at once for 10 meetings. ” I was feeling like life was not intended to be lived,” Armstrong told Vox. ” Anything can be attempted when you are so desperate. I thought my children had the right to have a cheerful, solid mother, and I had to realize that I had attempted all choices to be that for them.”