it’s not you, it’s me...(but also a little bit you)
my dearest tumblr,
we haven’t talked in a while. i mean, we still exist in the same space - I scroll endlessly for hours, clicking little hearts and if i’m super encouraged, the odd reblog button - but we’ve been disconnected from each other for a while now.
It wasn’t necessarily something either of us noticed for a while, it happened slowly and quietly, this divide between us. Coming here used to be exciting and fun and engaging. tumblr was a space that stimulated my thoughts on the world around me and beyond my small town. it was a space to find communities, to talk excitedly about things, to encourage one another.
It stopped being that place for me (and many of us) a long time ago. Yet, still I came. I continued to find solace in escaping from the stresses of my life into fandoms and memes and discussion. I filtered through the negativity, I tried to engage and be supportive of social justice and political topics, I continued to participate in communities navigating around too much toxicity.
At one time I used this place as a true blog. I wrote daily ramblings about my life in college and in my work. I wrote about my concerns of my career, I wrote through my coming out, I wrote about my insecurities returning to university. I shared many aspects of my life I was too nervous to talk about otherwise. Eventually, those posts became fewer as the landscape of tumblr changed. Now, writing this post feels incredibly weird to be talking into a void. I barely recognize the people I follow now - changed URLS, changed profile photos, changed content - it’s hard to keep it straight.
I should say, this disengagement isn’t entirely tumblr’s fault. I am not the 20 year old who joined here 7 years ago. But, I think I’ve been trying to hold on to aspects of that person for a long time. Too long, in fact. I lovingly refer to 2010-2012 as the Golden Era of my internet life. It’s when I discovered my love for digital media, for the future of what social media could offer and how we could connect from all corners of the world. It was such a naively optimistic perspective, but I stand by it as an influential time in positively making changes in my life. I think I’ve been holding onto threads of that optimism despite increased frustrations with the direction social media and the digital landscape has taken in recent years. But I also desperately held onto my time here as a form of escapism that did not factor how my life has changed in many *many* ways since I first started on here. I used to come home from a mentally and physically draining day at work or school and take a few hours to decompress on my own online. Now, I sit in front of a screen all day where I work on digital and social media at my job and come home...and do the same thing. It has had an increasingly adverse effect on my life and I have been ignoring it for a long long time. It’s an addiction. I know that. It’s a habit. It’s fucking hard to break. What am I missing when I’m not online? What news/meme/spoiler has come and gone that I should know about? What show/music/movie should I be binging? What celebrities does the hive mind approve of today and hate tomorrow? It’s exhausting.... and yet, every day, here I am.
I have stepped back. I have retreated into a more passive user, which is not in my personality’s nature for those who know me. It’s discouraging but it’s self-preservation. But being here so much, it’s sucking the life out of me. It’s feeding my depression and anxiety on a never-ending conveyor belt of distraction. When my laptop literally kicked the bucket a year and a half ago and I went 3 months without constant connection, I briefly escaped into discovering a life outside of a screen...only to immediately fall back down the rabbit hole when my new laptop arrived. The same has been over the last 4 months as my life was taken over by a community theatre production and my time in front of a screen took a dip. As that time wrapped up and winter has descended I can feel myself on that tipping point down the rabbit hole again.
So here we are. Seven years in and where do we go from here. I don’t really know. I don’t think I could ever, or would ever want to, split up with tumblr completely as this place has been such an important part of my life, it would be like burning my journals. I still enjoy finding fandoms and engaging media, so you will still see me liking and reblogging.
But, I need to step back. I need to stop picturing this place as a community. I don’t mean to be rude or to offend anyone by saying that. It’s just not a place where I am finding the aspects of community that I need in my life now as someone closer to 30 than to the 20 year old who started here.
So this isn’t goodbye, it’s just, see you around.
