The media simply cannot get over the fact that millennials have come out in masses to stand with Bernie Sanders on his quest for the presidency . As one of those 19-year-old millennials myself, I often consider the question on everyone’s mind– why?

When I hear about how Sanders would be the oldest President ever inaugurated and how his views have remained steady over the course of his long career, I wonder where and when I developed my own liberal views. Sure, my family is liberal, but I feel that my personal opinions lie deeper than those of my relatives. The next thought would be that my liberalism is a product of my generation, but that is a cyclical answer that does not exactly get us any further in exploring how the current liberal trend developed.

Tumblr was launched in 2007, but it was not until the fall of 2010 when I was 13 years old that I personally discovered the website. I introduced many of my close friends to it, and before long we were all posting and “reblogging” cutesy pictures of animals, celebrities, clothes, food, and the like. The aesthetics of my blog certainly changed as I got older, and my later posts featured many more photos of nature and serene scenes from around the world. It is important to note that for me, photos (taken by others) always remained the sole content of my blog. (I would also like to recognize that there are many, many varieties of blogs on Tumblr – “fandom” blogs about TV shows and movies, architecture blogs, music blogs, the list goes on.)

However, while my actual blog had more-or-less the same content for the 4 years that I ran it, the rest of my experience on the platform was much more dynamic. Tumblr allows bloggers to follow one another, and the content posted by everyone you follow gets chronologically added to the Dashboard, which is everyone’s personal homepage. I followed blogs from all over the United States and all over the world.

First and foremost, I cared about the pictures that the bloggers were sharing. But because Tumblr existed in a part of the Internet where parents did not, many users also treated their blogs as diaries. I was able to connect with people from all over the world with the click of a few buttons, learning about their lives, their families, and their friends. Maybe a blogger was gay and posted about how they had experienced homophobia that day. Their blog of pretty pictures then took on a new meaning – there was a person behind the blog, a teen just like me, and they were hurting. Even though I had never met them in person, their stresses became causes that became my concern too. It was personal without being tangible.

Or maybe my favorite blogger wrote a post about a day that was difficult because of their low-income background. Maybe someone (or someone in their family) was struggling with contraception because they lived in a “red state.” Personal posts about experiences with law enforcement allowed me to read about what people lived through, without the media coloring a story one way or another.

My exposure to the issues took on an almost personal significance that was primarily due to the fact that the content I was seeing was raw and unfiltered. Someone just like me with a blog in some corner of the world felt something and wrote about it. There were no editors telling them what to say or how to say it. Communities on Tumblr are strong because the bloggers decide that geographic location does not need to draw boundaries on caring. I experienced Tumblr at a pivotal time in the formation of my political and social views.

For the first time, with Bernie Sanders, I have come across a candidate who shares many of the same views with the added bonus of a sincerity that I would not expect from politicians. Bernie is 55 years my senior, but he might as well be a Tumblr-grown millennial considering his devout liberalism.