I received an email last week from Tumblr Headquarters wishing my page a Happy 5th birthday. I was shocked; I haven’t been on Tumblr in ages and I honestly forgot how long I had had it for. Tumblr consumed most of my early teen years. In class, I would scroll through it on my laptop while pretending to take notes, at sleepovers my friends and I would stay up into the early morning hours, huddled together on one of our beds trying to find the deepest quotes, and the lock screen on my phone was constantly being rotated out with my top Tumblr pictures of all time, my favorite one being a picture of a girl eating an apple with the quote “Pretty Girls Don’t Eat.”
Freshman year of high school was a very difficult time for me. I was at a new school, struggling to make friends, struggling with boys, and struggling with my mental health. I think I turned to Tumblr so often because it made me feel less alone. I would reblog and favorite all these quotes that resonated with me and the pain I was feeling. It seemed to me that everyone on Tumblr was dealing with some sort of issue, and it made me feel special that I understood the feelings people were portraying with their posts.
This is the problem with Tumblr. Everyone is sad and finds all these poetic ways to write about sadness. Mental disorders are glorified. Without even realizing it, by being exposed to posts that made depression seem beautiful, I became unconsciously convinced that it was almost cool for me to feel the way I did, like I was a part of some inside club. Instead of trying to find ways to help myself get better, I buried myself in my bed and became infatuated with the internet. It became a cycle that was almost impossible to break. When you feel alone, like it’s you against the world, it is easy to cling to things that make that feeling go away. Tumblr did that for me, and it is only now thinking back on it that I realize how detrimental it was.
I still use Tumblr on occasion, but every time I see a post going on about pain and sadness I immediately click off of it. Yes, it’s great to express your feelings through writing, but the constant exposure to other people’s sadness isn’t healthy for anybody, especially if it is glorified. If I could go back in time to 5 years ago, I would have never created my Tumblr account. With all the time I was wasting on that website, I could have been doing something infinitely more productive, spending time out in the world with real people instead of locked in my room drowning myself in my and thousands of other users' pain.
