An Ode to Tumblr

Tumblr in the early-mid 2010s was a lawless online wonderland of pro-ED content, (often underage) porn, glorified self harm and romanticized drug use. And for some years, it was a home to many of us.

“Why are you so upset that people you know look at your tumblr? That’s what happens when you put things on the internet. People see it.” What people would say to me when pointing out the lack of sense behind my desire to have the whole internet–except for my family and friends–to have access to my most personal and brutal displays of my suffering through blogging. It is a fair question. It is a discrepancy. And it is the same reason why when I speak at an AA meeting, I am more confident when I am standing in front of a room of fifty strangers, but when I am in front of a room of forty-seven strangers, my sponsor, and two of my friends, I am overly nervous and shaky and can’t get out of my head the whole time. At March’s poetry reading, I was relieved when my friend (who is also a poet!) said she wouldn’t be able to make it down, because that meant one last person in the crowd that I knew personally, one less person who had a preconceived notion of me whose perception could be swayed or altered based on my five minute display of vulnerability in front of a microphone.

It is the intimacy. The vulnerability. The desire to be seen for my suffering, but the fear of what it means to truly sit in intimacy with another person over my suffering.

The deep yearning to have the crevices be seen, but only by the people I could count on to never see again.

A cracking of myself open to display my heart and soul and ache, one I could leave where it stood without worrying about it following me home.

An uncovering and the sigh of relief when I feel the soothing winds across the tears of my skin, to be witnessed by the clouds in the sky but not by the trees planted beside me.

If you know, you know; Tumblr in the early-mid 2010s was a lawless online wonderland of pro-eating disorder content, (often underage) porn, glorified self harm and romanticized drug use. And for some years, it was a home to many of us. I grew up in the pool of zillennials that were middle school kids when the unregulated internet at its peak–being a 12 year old chatting on IMVU and learning when to lie when asked “A/S/L?”, being groomed (to put it gently) by a woman who was at least twice my age of 12 years old and knew it, being flirted with and bullied through anonymous questions on Formspring. I was familiar with the internet, being a kid on the internet was a channel for me to escape and explore the shadow parts of me I was ashamed of and didn’t have the courage or space to bring them to light in. So when I joined Tumblr once I got into high school, I was stepping into an enthralling online world of all the curiosities of the lifestyles I was budding into.

Tumblr became my emotional home. I found people who felt the same things as me who lived in other states and countries. People with similar stories and dreams as me. People who wrote poetry and paragraphs about a feeling that I never realized I had until I read it the way they put it. People who shared art and photography that gave me a sense of hope and inspiration during a time when things so easily felt so meaningless. I journaled my own thoughts, and reblogged gifs from Skins episodes, black and white photos of self harm scars, and quotes from poetry books to curate a page on the internet that illustrated what I felt and how I experienced the world. It was a passive way to be seen by others while not having to look them in the eyes.

Early tumblr is where I came to terms with being bisexual, because I got to explore that idea somewhere that I was protected from the potential judgment and ridicule of people in my life. I got to see and read things, hear from others about their queerness, and that made it easy for me to formulate my own journey into my queerness. My first gay romance that ebbed and flowed for years as we both grew into ourselves was actually sparked by an (initially) anonymous Formspring message she sent me, expressing that she was also bisexual but not yet ready to tell anyone.

I found a lot of romanticization of drug use in tumblr-land, and that’s also where I found practices and advice for safer drug use (and safer self harm!). I found inspiration for art, shared my own writing, drawings, and photos, and fed it back into the swirling pool of creativity that is the #art tumblr feed.

This mode of expression did not go without consequences for me. The first time I experienced psychiatric incarceration was due to the images of self harm that I shared on my tumblr. I remember the faux-concerned doctor scrolling across my tumblr page in the room with my dad while my mom was on speakerphone, pointing out the things that I had posted and their cause for concern. He paused–in a way that was clearly planned–at a black and white gif of a woman who was staring into the camera as she snorted a bump of coke off her hand and suggested with authority that that was me in the photo, simply because it “looked like me,” clearly not understanding at all the functionality of reblogging a post. The week that I spent there fucking sucked.

from my #fav reblogs

People on the outside, friends and family, looked into my tumblr to see a cry for help the same way that people would see the cuts on my arms and also interpret it as a cry for help. I didn’t see it that way at the time, and when people would imply such a thing I would be frustrated and offended because I interpreted that to mean that I was “just doing it for attention,” another thing people would say, which minimized the actual emotion and pain I was coping through. 10-15 years or so later having grown up some, I can now see that those actions were cries for help over the pain that I was in. I was crying for help as I was a teenager whose complex trauma was budding into self destruction through self harm and drug addiction because I didn’t have the tools or resources to move in any other direction. The behaviors I was engaging in and broadcasting to the world were scary to the people who cared about me and they also had limited resources or understanding of how to handle the situation. And I was far enough along in the process that intervention wasn’t going to be of any use.

Because at the time, all I needed, all that was going to help me, was to be seen. I was crying for help not for intervention but for recognition, acknowledgement, and solidarity. It was similar to when you go to a friend with a problem, and before they jump into trying to fix the problem they pause and ask, “are you in problem-solving mode, or are you in feelings mode where you just need me to listen while you vent?” Because the same way that drugs helped to keep me alive for the time that they did, self harm also kept me alive. They kept me from killing myself, even if it looked like that’s what I was doing from an outside perspective. I wasn’t trying to kill myself–I was doing whatever I could to help myself stay alive.

Eventually, I learned my lesson and switched my tumblr from public to private. I went through a few different accounts over the years but still have access the same one I used throughout the last couple years of high school and a few years afterwards, as I documented my descent into my heroin addiction, however, a decent amount of my original photos have been flagged and taken down since Tumblr’s 2018 crackdown on its content (nothing has ever been the same since, overall likely for the best). Looking back on it is a catapult into my life as I scroll through my #personal tagged posts and watch the evolution of my struggles in life until my posts go dark one day after my phone got stolen out of my lap while I was nodding out in the staircase of the park.

Now, we have Substack. Now, I am sharing vulnerable collections of words and allowing the intimacy of being seen for my experiences with the world by the world. I am inviting people in my life to be included when I click “send to everyone now,” because I know that my words are important to be shared, and I have to share them somewhere. Our experiences are our power and the written word is one way that power is passed on, treasured, preserved. When I was an unregulated teenager on the internet, I was open through a crack in myself that at the time I thought was there because I was broken. I was so fresh in my experience with life that I had no choice but to let the suffering, love, despair, connection, and creativity pour out of me through that crack raw and unfiltered. I had no other option but to split myself open and stand exposed to the whole world because there was nowhere else I could’ve shoved away this massive burden of being I was carrying.

As the years go on and I’ve grown into my sobriety and adulthood I’ve learned how to–because we have to if we want to survive–close myself up. Like the stitches I’d get sewn into my wrist in the emergency room, I’ve learned to stitch up the split in me that everything used to pour out of into my tumblr and poetry and journal entries. And fuck, does that get boring. As scary as it may be to a 28 year old who has done a lot of work to move away from the person they were at 15, I am inviting myself back into opening up the cracks of exposed intimacy and channeling it into my writing. Because that is where my power lies. So thank you, Tumblr, for being a lawless wonderland when I needed one.

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