Through the early 2010s, I had a little life. Way before doomscrolling on TikTok was a thing, there was a dusty blue interface that held pieces of my other soul—an instant window into my alternate universe. The all-too-familiar interface belonged (or shall I say belongs?) to Tumblr, where I resided for the most part of my easily impressionable years. For better and for worse, it was where I learnt fandom culture; where I turned to when I was 15 and thought I was the most emo kid on the block; and where I simply learned to be, at least on the Internet. It was my little life, in an otherwise big and scary world.
Over the past few years, there has been plenty of coffee table talk about whether the social blogging platform would ever be revived. Many will cite the heydays of their once-thriving accounts, but not many will remember how they eventually came off it. For some—especially queer folk—the bans put in place on ‘adult content’ back in 2018 did have significant implications for their usage of the platform and it drove them out.
For many others, Tumblr was just one of the many social platforms they concurrently ran, and possibly compared to its fellow cousins—namely Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). It didn’t feel like a platform which one had to upkeep and align to one’s real world persona; it wasn’t a LinkedIn profile, nor an Instagram feed that chronologically fed others with tidbits of your real life. For most, it was a personal space—a blog—that one could always return to at any time. There are no expiry dates on always.
Alas, it’s the latter sentiment I’m adopting in recent times. Last month, Addison Rae dropped a music video for her latest single ‘High Fashion’. With its atmospheric mise-en-scène, a sugar-coated set and stark visuals of her body writhing in a dry, fire-encroached plain, it’s nostalgic of Tumblr era circa 2012—visuals I’ve been feeling nostalgic for, to say the least.
So I scoured for my old password, and logged myself back in again, for the first time in four years (I had fancied a similar exploration back in ‘21, although no reblogging had happened then). I was posturing a venture back into the virtual unknown. Granted, some of its new features such as Communities, and the visible change to the dashboard did have me fumbling my way through for a bit, but it didn’t take me long before I found my footing again.
Disregarding the updated interface, there was a sense of familiarity that slowly settled in. It was like replaying an old voice in my head: this is where GIFs just hit differently, and where I could find a comrade-in-arms in the downright mental comments section of a grainy (read: 144p) post about kettles. Scrolling further down my following page, I realised that some of the accounts whom I had followed from back then had never left Tumblr behind them; they’ve been blogging consistently over the years.
But it was equally an exercise in finding out about myself. It seemed, be it ten or fifteen years on, I still gravitated towards the same few obsessions. There was Harry Potter fanfiction and a whole load of anime art. By way of music tastes, the list ran the gamut from K-pop to the confessional, emo era we all went through then (the title of my own blog has Panic! somewhere in it). Not to be forgotten? A perennial, intense love for all things cat-related.
But it was certainly a fun ride in also finding out how frighteningly bonkers I must have been about some of my more micro-obsessions. Peeta’s enduring love in The Hunger Games; the on-screen chemistry between Bellamy and Clarke from dystopian series The 100; and the perennial ship that was Lydia and Stiles from Teen Wolf. There were plenty of girl crushes too: Kristen Stewart, Lorde, Lana, Emma Stone, Emma Watson…you name it. And in random corners of my adolescent years, there were even early stirrings of body positive posts; as if one reblog about Emilia Clarke calling attention to her cleavage could have equated to my first bold step into the landscape of what we intellectualise as feminism today.
Truth is, when you’ve spilled your confessions all over the Internet as a raging teenager, there is no end to the world of cringe. Yet, its very essence and conscience remains clear. In a universe of new social media platforms that pop up every now and then, Tumblr has always been less about the ‘social’, and more of the…everything else. It maintains its anonymity; you could exist as completely different entities of yourself, the selves you never want to let people in the real world perceive you for—whether you’re 13 and insecure, or well, 27 (and still insecure!).
It might have taken my own embarkations back to the periphery of the Internet to discover that nowhere feels safer—both then, and now. Biding, waiting, biding its time…they proffer that Tumblr is dead, but they’ve been saying that since forever. Welcome back to weird, folks.
