My Tumblr Addiction: Yeesh it's embarrassing to type that out

I joined Tumblr 12 years ago, back in 2013. At the time it had just been bought out by Yahoo so there was a lot of excitement around the platform. It was "the future" of blogging. I was just about 17. I had a Livejournal and a Blogger blog, but the only social media I had was Facebook, and mainly just to play Pet Society (does anyone even remember Pet Society?). I had interacted with Tumblr before in order to view Phineas and Ferb fanart, but found it's structure a little confusing. Still, I decided to give it a shot. I almost instantly became hooked. I was a lonely akward teenager, and getting a few notes on a post was the closest thing I had to "social interaction with my peers". I spent the two paltry hours I had free after homework on Tumblr, sometimes staying up too late for a little extra time. I don't need to explain to you what Tumblr culture was like in it's heyday, there are tons of videos romanticizing those "simpler times". Dashcon happened while I was barely aware of it. I watched Sherlock even though it was bad. I watched people liveblog the Ferguson protests. I had always cared about the history of civil rights in America, but Tumblr was the first time I ever met people my age who actually cared about social issues. They called us SJWs back then, "woke" was still an AAVE term. I encountered a lot of discourse, but when I was younger it all seemed simpler. I was sure people would eventually learn that bigotry was wrong, that everyone would figure it all out and get along in the end, even if they were fighting right now. Still, I learned to carefully currate my online persona in order to avoid "callout posts". I don't know when Tumblr started to make me mad. When you're just trying to surivive, it's hard to recoguze how your coping mechamisms are harming you. I think the first time I really got frustrated with it was when my mom brought her boyfreinds old, slowly dying dog over to our house, and instead of petting the dog and saying goodbye like I wanted too, I found myself scrolling Tumblr on our home computer the whole time until the dog was abrupty taken back home, and I never saw him again. That's when I knew it had gotten out of control. But I couldn't quit Tumblr, my *only* freinds where on there. I went from posting embaressing memes to trying to write a "funny" textpost. I excitedly anwered asks. I begged my freinds not to kill themselves and stayed up late checking their blogs. I watched movies with my freinds on rabb.it or whatever it was called and dreamed of meeting them IRL someday. I watched freinds deactivate after the NSFW ban. I got into fights with terfs. I got transtion advice from strangers. The discoure came and went in cycles, making the website unbearble to use at times. But still, I refreshed the activity page again and again. The dopamine hit you get from pouring you heart out, writing something that is at once personal and intened to be universal, and then seeing your freinds like that post, seeing in succed, seeing conformation that you're not the only person in the world who thinks like you do, it's without compare. It's very hard to not become relyant on that type of thing, esspecially when it feels like no one in your IRL life listens to you. It's not wrong to not want to be alone, to seek comfort in community with other people. But all social media, even outdated defanged social media like Tumblr, is designed to get you hooked, and to keep you angry so you stay hooked. I don't know if I got older or more jaded or if it really got worse, but I found the contents of my dash less and less amusing and more and more aggrivating. Tumblr has always been a haven for insular pointless discourse that literally couldn't exist outside of it's bubble, and maybe it's just because I've seen it happen so many times before, but at this point I find it incredibly annoying how you can't use the site without running into it in some way. I've seen so many people I consitered close freinds drift away, changing their URLs, losing track of them...and I have so many freinds I've know for years but failed to get closer too because of my own fears. I spend hours on Tumblr every day, wasting the majority of my free time on a website I no longer like using and can't tear myself away from. So I've decide to make a real effort to stop using Tumblr. Not to quit cold turkey, I've tried that before and it didn't work. But just to gradually wean myself off from it, to stop checking my actvity page whenever I need a hit, to stop thinking about everything in terms of what Tumblr users would think. This is my first step, to just use it less. I hope someday I can use Tumblr like once a week, or maybe just keep it as an archive of my old posts and as a way to contact my oldest freinds and perhaps talk to them elsewhere. That's my goal. This blog is my effort to find another outlet for self expression, one that is perhaps less limited by the expecations of what you're "allowed" to post about. We'll see how it goes.