Trigger warning: This article discusses suicide and may be distressing for some readers.

When blogger and author Heather Armstrong died last week, at just 47, she was widely eulogised as the 'Queen of the Mummy Bloggers'.

Armstrong started her blog, Dooce, in 2001, and over the next decade showed how a woman in the internet age could, as the New York Times described it, "make her life into a living".

But as one of the 'original influencers', she couldn't have possibly anticipated what that kind of life entailed. That she had signed up to a life marked by strangers' opinions, and that those opinions would continue even after she died by suicide.

In the days after Armstrong's partner confirmed her death to the Associated Press, thousands of tributes were posted online. A number of Armstrong's contemporaries referenced the hate she'd received as a public figure, and how it had affected her. Armstrong herself referenced how her mental health had been impacted by the commentary about her in an interview with Vice in 2019, describing it as "untenable". But in one dark corner of the internet - where the hatred for Armstrong had been unfolding for years - a group of people became immediately defensive.

Between profoundly cruel remarks about Armstrong's suicide and what it means for her family, the consensus was: She's not exempt from criticism and commentary. We're not going to absolve someone of their sins just because they've died. And if you live a public life, this is the price you pay.

But when did we decide this was the price? Surely, too, it's time for an honest discussion about the types of people who are disproportionately paying it.

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The story of Heather Armstrong, the human being, is complicated.

She wrote openly about her depression and alcoholism, her decision to leave the church she was raised in, the highs and lows of motherhood, and the ugly parts of her career. There is no way to piece together a narrative that explains her death, because suicide and the reasons for it are fundamentally unknowable.

The story of Heather Armstrong, the internet personality, is far more simple. It follows a familiar trajectory to anyone who's watched a woman rise online, and then inevitably fall.

Dooce.com started with Armstrong writing (under a pseudonym) about her bosses at work. She thought she was being careful, never using their names or mentioning the company, but within a few months the blog was discovered and she was fired.

From here, her traffic grew. The idea of being fired for what you write on the internet was entirely unheard of, and was picked up by news outlets.

But Armstrong was quickly learning that what she wrote affected real people. She posted stories on her blog making fun of her neighbour's dog, and then her neighbour found the website and stopped speaking to her.

Dooce went quiet for six months, but when Armstrong came back, her audience immediately returned. When she discovered she was pregnant, she wrote prolifically, certain she'd have to quit as soon as she had a child. Of course, what Armstrong did instead was birth a baby and a 'mummy blog'.

She shared her unfiltered truth about motherhood, including her experience with postpartum depression and inpatient care.

A few years into launching Dooce, Armstrong started to monetise it with banner ads. At its peak, the site had over 8 million monthly readers, and was earning $40,000 a month. In 2009, Armstrong appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was named by Forbes as one of the 30 most influential women in media.

But with this popularity came a new audience: people who followed her every move because they hated her. They left comments for her directly, but also created forums to discuss her.

The general philosophy behind these forums (which I won't name) is that anonymous users can say whatever they like because they're not speaking directlytothe person they hate. Armstrong, for example, would've had to find the forum in order to read what was written about her - which of course isn't difficult in an age of Google alerts.

The commentary ranged from accusations that Armstrong had sold out ("I’m Depressed, brought to you in part by Meow Mix,") to pure contempt about her vulnerabilities ("Heather needs to get the f**k over her childhood trauma. Like dude, you’re 43 and you’ve spent half your life in therapy. You have a f**king sweet life.")

She was routinely called "embarrassing," "pathetic," a bully, accused of loving one of her children more than the other, made fun of for being "out of place" at public appearances, and generally being "full of sh*t."

"She is such a sad, miserable little person now. I feel bad for her, for her children and for her husband," one comment reads.

Armstrong's parenting was dissected in detail, with pages of comments about how one of her children wasn't fully toilet trained at three, how her child "always" had badly chapped lips and was potentially dehydrated, and how she was going to scar her kids for life.

It was constant. Unrelenting. Everything from a typo to the texture of her skin ("it looks like she slept in a coffin") to her 'mean girl' mannerisms to her relationships were torn apart. For years.