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On turning 27 and why I am never deleting my Tumblr

It is 2025. I am turning 27, and I have chosen to do that alone. I spent way too much money on an omakase dinner, and tomorrow, I'll spend even more money on a small cake that I'll eat while finishing my laundry. On the weekend, I'll celebrate my birthday with friends. But before that, I have to clean my kitchen, finish a giant report at work, and fill out scholarship applications. This is not what I imagined I would be doing when I turned 27, but I am old enough to appreciate the mundanity of my adulthood and the brief respites birthdays provide.

When I was 13, 27 felt #very #adult. So adult that I convinced myself that I was either going to 1) die or 2) get married when I hit 27. I was a depressed teenage girl, and, like many of my peers, I craved death but didn't actually want to end it (or deal with the aftermath of trying), so I settled for fantasies to get through the day. One of those was the expiration date-- 27-- because all the #Famous and #Hot Celebrities I read about in magazines died when they were 27, and they had a lot more to live for than I, a depressed teenager rotting in the suburbs, did. But, if I didn't die, I had to get married, because that's what you do when you are a very well-adjusted adult with a long-term (and hopefully rich) boyfriend.

Like many teenage girls in the early 2010s, I assumed said long-term and hopefully boyfriend would be Harry Styles of One Direction. Two years earlier, I had discovered One Direction through a gif of Liam Payne that I found searching Google Images for references of pretty boys to draw poorly for my Deviant Art. The Gif was posted to Tumblr, a website I had heard about in various online forums I had no business being on as a child. I spent an hour clicking through the various rebloggers, searching for more information on One Direction, before I found out about One Direction Twitter through a blog that also posted 90s era Sailor Moon gifs with a feminist slant. Looking at that blog, I thought to myself, "Wow. This is special. This is adult."

Because Tumblr was so #special and #adult, I decided to honor the website's age rules. So I waited. I waited two years, biding my time by bookmarking key Tumblr Blogs shared across the "trash" side of One Direction Twitter and the Sailor Moon themed blog. Bad 1d Imagines, Katara (later, of shrimp fried this rice fame), a very #cool teenager I later learned lived a few towns away from me and fantasized about meeting, etc etc. The minute I turned 13, I opened up an account and followed them all.

Tumblr gave me a community, it gave me guidance, and, most importantly it gave me a space to safely be a girl. I grew up on the internet during the 2000s, which was a decidedly terrible time for being a girl. Genuinely enjoying girly things was a sign of weakness and cringe. Eschewing girly things or embracing Girl Power meant you wanted to be a boy, or worse, were a lesbian. Insisting you had rights, asking for better treatment, or just simply existing as girl invited disdain, hostility, and violence from total strangers. The way people talked about girls on the internet, in magazines, in the news, on the playground, and in my household made it clear that being a girl was the worst thing I could be. There was no way out, and there was no way to win. I was trapped, and I hated it. I wanted to be three years old and enjoying 90s sailor moon and dancing to EVERYBODY by Backstreet Boys. I could settle for reblogging it while British boys sang about how Katy Perry is on replay in my bedroom.

Tumblr not only gave me the language to define this feeling and frustration, it provided me space to explore girlhood and slowly get rid of the negativity I was taught to associate with it. Looking back, I can say it also saved me from going down a right-wing pipeline that many other chronically online white, suburban children with negligent parents fell into in the early 2010s.

I left Tumblr in 2016. I told myself, I was going to college, and it was time to be an #adult, and Tumblr no longer felt #adult. Looking back, I had definitely just hit a boiling point with a few key issues--- the fact that my fave blogs were moving on to Twitter and Youtube, the inescapable amount of Hamilton and Onceler content on the site, the realization that I left a trove of online evidence of my Dr. Who phase, the lingering frustration over never going viral on here, and the creeping realization that I had spent so much time trying to earn strangers approval on the same site that was doing discourse about Onceler p-rn instead of putting effort into my offline friends. But I didn't want to think about that. I couldn't. Instead, I just told myself I simply had gotten everything out of Tumblr that I needed from Tumblr, and it was time to be an adult.

At the very adult age of 27, I decided to log into my Tumblr for the first time in years. It's been a long time coming. A few years ago, I befriended someone who was Tumblr famous (lowkey) and, as expected, is extremely cool and funny. We talk about how thankful we are for it, and how cool and funny it made us, even though it felt like we were in the trenches. We speak in references only known to those who have our specific brand of tumblr brain rot, and exchange stories about 2014 era online drama that were exclusive to our specific feeds.

Two years ago, I half-jokingly predicted a Tumblr resurgence, and they said something like, "resurgence? it never died." Last year, Liam Payne died at 33, an age I couldn't imagine reaching when I first saw that gif, but I now recognize as incredibly young, and I thought about Tumblr. I thought about how I wanted to get married to Harry Styles, and laughed about how I thought I would be getting married at 27.

This year, I started reading Kaitlyn Tiffany's book, "Everything I need from you: How fangirls created the internet as we know it." It's about online culture and One Direction. I justified purchasing it by telling myself I was preparing for grad school and rediscovering more informative forms of entertainment than my current go-to: endlessly scrolling social media sites that monetize my attention spans and then use ad money to subsidize (primarily) right wing content and political movements. In reality, I just love One Direction, fangirls, and the internet-- enough to write a masters thesis about it.

I am 27 and I am nostalgic for Tumblr. And on my 27th birthday, it finally feels right to reconnect with a time in my life where I had the least amount of empathy for myself, on a platform that earnestly set me down the path towards developing that empathy. So here I am, deciding to not only open my blog, but post about this. EW!

A year ago, I never thought I would say those words. But I have spent the past week reading about fangirls and thinking about all the internet history lost because people deleted links or deactivated their tumblrs. I spent the last four years frustrated about all the incomplete, inaccessible, or missing links I find trying to write up a research report for work. I understand the importance of archiving. In the moment, reblogging a Liam Payne gif or a video of a Barney stuffed animal getting shot and then told to meet his maker felt ephemeral and silly. But it can mean some silly researcher, 10 years down the line, has a better understanding of what life was like for you when you were 13 or 16. And it means that you may have a better chance of seeing that video, 20 years down the line, and suddenly getting transported back to your childhood bedroom, and remembering what it felt like to be a teenage girl.

Posting and deleting is a philosophical practice ™ . Embracing your humiliating online archive is, I would argue, an act of historical preservation and radical sincerity, which has become a scarce commodity on social media. As a woman in a Garfield costume once told me, to cringe is proof that you have changed and grown up a little-- to cringe is to be alive.

All this is to say, I'm logging off to do laundry and be a 27 year old adult with job and responsibilities and agency, and thankfully, none of it involves planning a wedding to Harry Styles or anyone else. But I am keeping My Tumblr online, hopefully for forever-- or at least until Yahoo or whoever pulls the plug and this website kicks the bucket. I am doing so because My Tumblr is an archive of my (frankly embarrassing!) history as a dangerously online teenage girl. It serves as a testament to my own development as a person, as evidence of our collective ability to change and grow and possibly even log off, and, maybe as a resource for internet researchers.

happy posting

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