Why am I back here?
It’s period one of my first ever high school class—Ms. Simpson’s English—and I’m sitting next to a girl boasting about her 8,000 followers on Tumblr. Until that moment, I had been steadily avoiding Tumblr on the advice of my older sister’s friends, who warned me about the explicit content, mature themes, and the neerdowells that inhabited the site. As a 12-year-old attending an all-girls Catholic school—quietly grappling with my non-hetero sexuality and burgeoning atheistic tendencies—I believed I had enough to deal with without adding Tumblr to the mix.
Looking back now, at 24, I’m still unsure what it was about this girl’s tone (or her outright belief that her Tumblr status elevated her above the rest of us) that compelled me to create my first account. But in that moment, I felt challenged. I wanted to outdo her. This was the beginning of my undoing.
The account I created, which no longer belongs to me (I eventually sold it at its peak), was called “kawaiiinpink.” It was dedicated entirely to all things pink and aesthetically pleasing. I taught myself HTML just to design a blog that would be undeniably superior to her Lana-coded sad-girl page. As I gained followers and ventured deeper into the underbelly of Tumblr, I was exposed to some of the internet’s filth: Ana propaganda, self-harm confessions, hardcore porn, and diary entries that should never have been made public—content fed to me daily through the explore page. It slowly distorted my young mind and my sense of self.
Two months in, I began binge eating. I had convinced myself I would never look like Alexa Chung, so I punished myself through a cycle of bingeing and yo-yo dieting, eventually gaining 10 kilograms in the span of a year—a shameful, self-fulfilling prophecy. As my belly grew, so did my online presence. “kawaiiinpink” reached 50,000 followers, and the direct messages became increasingly depraved. I spent hours reading requests to show my “pink bits,” reacting to strangers asking me to rate their naked bodies, and fighting off bots trying to purchase my account. Tumblr had become my primary media diet, yet the only place I could indulge in it was the privacy of my bedroom. Even though no one was forcing me to stay there, I came to associate Tumblr with a kind of guilty pleasure—a secret that had to be hidden. That period lasted two and a half years.
Now, as an adult reflecting on the bedroom through the lens of academic art practice, I can confidently name Tumblr as a critical puzzle piece in the development of my work. It was the first space where I encountered confession, shame, and the raw broadcasting of one’s unfiltered self to an anonymous audience; one that could respond without consequence. Returning to Tumblr, as a platform shaped by radical transparency and rampant free thought, feels like a natural extension of my current research into the bedroom as a site of meditation, growth, and connection. Tumblr’s architecture (anonymous, image-heavy, and archive-driven) mirrors the emotional interiority of the bedroom: private yet performative, intimate yet intrinsically linked to broader cultural rhythms. Just as the bedroom is a space to retreat, unravel, fantasise, and rebuild, Tumblr once offered me a similarly liminal zone; where shame, longing, obsession, and self-reflection could be publicly rehearsed. Its legacy as a confessional space for youth in crisis aligns seamlessly with my desire to excavate the psychic residue embedded in domestic environments. By returning to the platform, I aim to reactivate a former mode of expression—part digital reliquary, part emotional outburst—where the bedroom is not merely represented but embodied through scrolling, curating, and posting as acts of self-meditation.
-- Luckk
