For nearly two years now, my daily blog reading has included Heather Armstrong’s classic Dooce and her husband’s equally entertaining Blurbomat. Through the lens of a blogger, we’ve seen Heather and Jon move to Utah, get fired, find a new job, buy a house, remodel a kitchen, have a child, and struggle with the black dog of depression.
Now it looks like the dog is back and isn’t going away:
I wish that I could tell you that the reason you won’t be hearing anything from me in the next several days is because we’re right on the verge of launching the redesign. And we are, I promise, we’re right there, just a few more MT plug-ins and some tweaking on the templates and we may have a new site! But that’s not the reason.
It’s also not because Leta is really cute in her caterpillar pajamas. Or that her face smells really good.
The reason you won’t be hearing anything from me for several days is because this morning Jon is driving me up to the hospital and I’m going to check into the psychiatric ward. I am very scared that if I don’t go ahead and do this that I may experience some sort of nervous breakdown.
As I’ve written before, I’m highly sympathetic to this – not just because I love the Dooce blog, but because I had my own struggles with depression twelve years ago.
I never had to check myself into a psychiatric ward – but I did go through several weeks of counseling and took Prozac for a time. Thankfully, those days are behind me – and I hope I’ve learned enough to not have to ever go down that road again.
While I will miss Dooce in the weeks ahead, I truly hope that this break from the world will prove to be the catalyst that she needs to pull through – we’ll be thinking of Heather and Jon often over here….