Why is Tumblr so cringey?
Because there’s nothing wrong with being cringey!
There’s nothing wrong with being a teenager exploring your interests without restriction, finding a welcoming and energetic community. Where instead of the world rudely and uselessly bashing you down for your spirit, people engage in the wonderful passions you love. Where instead of finding rejection, you can find acceptance for your own identity and soul.
There’s nothing wrong with being passionate about stories about magical skeletons and goat moms, when those stories provide so much joy, happiness, light, and hope in your life. There’s nothing wrong with finding a place where you can ebulliently scream out all the things you feel, express out that sense of happiness and hope you feel. There’s nothing wrong with finding inspiration in any facet of our lives, and it’s truly a good thing for us to be able to engage with the things that are positives and dear to our hearts. Engaging in these things will make our souls flourish.
There’s nothing wrong with being a mother going online to draw anime girls, to create self-insert OCs, to write wish-fulfillment fanfics, because adding a few years to our lives doesn’t mean we still can’t enjoy creating art and fiction. There’s nothing wrong in watching a television show when you’re 15 or when you’re 50. All our lives are enriched through recreation and imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with being a young adult who’s finally coming to terms with your sexuality, your gender, your identity, and you can use a space to think through and grapple with everything you’re handling. Talk about it 24/7? Apply it to your favorite tv shows 24/7? You know, maybe that’s what you need to process it and feel proud of yourself and how far you’ve come.
There’s nothing wrong with being young and trying to figure out how to socialize. There’s nothing wrong with being an introvert and trying to figure out how to socialize. There’s nothing wrong with being non-neurotypical and trying to figure out how to socialize. There’s nothing wrong with being isolated and trying to figure out how to socialize. There’s nothing wrong with being a non-native [insert language here] speaker and trying to figure out how to socialize.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There will be mistakes. There will be conflict. There will be misinterpretations and there will be poor words exchanged. There will be fights over vastly unimportant things and there will be toxic call-out cultures where we immediately assume someone else is a devil, rather than give them the benefit of the doubt needed. There will be hate mail and trolls and bullying and bigoted anons. There will be people who are barely beginning to learn about politics making assumptions with absurd conclusions. There will be people preaching platforms that should make anyone’s eyebrows raise. There will be people who immediately turn someone into an enemy, rather than find an opportunity to exchange ideas and help someone who’d be capable and willing to listen.
But. In all this. Hopefully, there will growth. We all need a space where we can come in the journeys of our lives to learn how to interact with one another, to learn those social skills, and it might as well be here than anywhere else.
I always see human lives as a web of interactions. We’re going to make mistakes wherever we are. A highly international, diverse place like tumblr is going to have one of the most complicated webs because of the huge number of interactions that take place. The threads are like to get hugely tangled that way. There’s so many threads to work with and so many opportunities for a thread to snag. In an anonymous space where so many people can rub elbows, there’s bound to be drama. But the threads can also weave beautiful, glorious patterns. And with the number of threads we have online, we’ll get intricate and colorful patterns. Patterns we wouldn’t find anywhere else. Relationships, friendships, ideas, meaningful connections, creative energies, and human spirit we wouldn’t find anywhere else but this.
Sure, there’s going to be trash fires going on here, and I admit I roll my eyes a lot when something crosses my dash. But we’re all human. We all have done something to make someone else roll their eyes. Goodness knows, I am worthy of many eyerolls. I’m not going to judge the child for making a post about politics that, in four years, they’ll probably not believe themselves. I’m not going to mock the person drawing AU ship art for something I find absurd but they personally find emotionally stimulating. I might internally sigh at someone making a terrible, illogical jump to conclusions, but in the grand scheme of things, someone misinterpreting the use of the color pink in a television show isn’t something to get worked up about. And when there are bad fights, I’ll just remember: fights happen everywhere, and likely as not, this one will die in three days. Crapfests aren’t some tumblr-exclusive thing. Humans have been finding creative places and ways to bicker since we figured out we could move our big toes. There will be just as many happy interactions for me to get engaged in instead.
And......... even those trash fires can be beautiful. They can be points of mirth. I’ll laugh hard at a clusterfuck of interactions where everyone made wild jumps in logic. I’ll grin broadly and share the latest ridiculous meme. I’ll make my own shitposts because life is too short not to be ridiculous.
Humans are valuable and wonderful for our trash fires, too.
