Here’s to 9 years of limping along on Tumblr
I started my first Tumblr (unsustainable.tumblr.com) on November 23, 2008. Obama had recently been elected and I had lived in NYC for about four months. My divorce wasn’t finalized yet, but I was poring over OKC profiles, looking for someone who existed only in my imagination. I was deeply confused and the economy was tanking. All my local publishing friends who had work to give me were losing their jobs and I was scrambling to find any kind of editorial work I could.
My old friend (also my roommate in Portland) had moved to New York several years before me, and she was all about Tumblr. She and I had mostly abandoned LiveJournal by that point, me even more than her. In fact, she unfriended me on LJ about six months after I’d moved to NY and I couldn’t read her posts anymore. Her Tumblr was all style and no substance, just like her LiveJournal, so I wasn’t that hurt to be cut. But I was confused—we finally lived in the same city and hung out fairly regularly (or so I thought). When I asked her why she’d unfollowed me, she said that she didn’t want to be friends online with someone who wasn’t a daily presence in her offline life. I was hurt and angry, and stayed that way for a long time. We are more or less (mostly less) friends again after, what, 7 years or so of not being friends at all, but that LJ fight was pretty much the end of us.
Tumblr gave me a like-minded community almost immediately, which I desperately needed. I needed a space where I wasn’t being judged as harshly as I was in the world of online dating or interviewing for jobs. I met tons of people because of it and it was as if they already knew me. I made fast friends, deep friends, I fell in love with someone’s writing at least once, I pined after people near and far, I got in internet fights, I vagueblogged, I ranted, I rage-deleted rants, I found new people to care about, I laughed my ass off, and I unfollowed whoever and whenever.
I could name names but most of my Tumblr people have wandered off to different spaces, just like I have. But back then, it seemed like everybody and their ex had a Tumblr! The overlap in contacts was huge. I even went to Tumblr meetups a couple of times and they were more fun than they sound. No one was more surprised than me!
A couple years into it, I got a stalker. I think I inherited it from another friend who had more to lose than I did, so she bailed offline completely. It was awful for about a year. Every time I’d complain to the authorities, the stalker would start a new Tumblr, reblogging my personal photos and talking so much smack. They would write to anyone who'd liked my posts to tell them what a spouse-stealing slut I was. Then that friend would write me and say, “Did you know someone hates you!? What should I do? Should I respond?” It was terrible and I got so self-conscious. I refuse to engage with trolls, though, so I ignored them studiously and took anything personal off the internet.
Eventually, I broke down, deleted Unsustainable, and changed my Tumblr name to this one. (Semper Idem means “forever item” or, roughly, “same thing.”)
A lot of shit has changed in the last NINE YEARS, so it’s nice to come here and find that Tumblr is more or less the same. Always changing but always the same. Semper idem.
