My Life As A Secret Tumblr Star
How the most useless social media platform made me a better person.
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This piece was originally written in 2017. It has now been updated in 2023 with additional context of my journey.
This is a story of how being chronically online ended up being a good thing. There are many stories about how the internet will rot your kid’s brain. Here is one about the opposite.
I am not, and never was, one of Tumblr’s most popular users. As of writing this, I only have 40,000 followers, which, compared to legendary bloggers like marsincharge or Macleod Sawyer, is basically nothing. I never made money off of Tumblr, (except a few dollars from the Post+ beta, unlike the short-lived empires some teenagers used to have), I still don’t get credit for the meme I created, unlike the legendary Viners, whose faces could be seen, and I never became a movie star like the big YouTubers and TikTokers.
I’m just a woman who, like so many other annoying little nerds, liked anime and Doctor Who in high school, and who had a friend who showed them the “blue hellsite.” Now I have a URL that I’m ashamed to utter in public because it’s the Tumblr equivalent of your 7th grade Yahoo email address, but I can’t change it because, apparently, I’m a little bit infamous.
Meet elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey, the blog that changed my life.
For the uninitiated, Tumblr isn’t about “blogging” as you might know it. It combines traditional blogging with the interactivity of Twitter, to create a space unlike any other. To survive there, you must embrace the entropy of the internet and embrace authenticity. It’s half reblogging others’ content, and half adding your own two cents.
How did I get this popular? The same way many chronically online people started — I was a depressed teen looking for people like me, and spent way too much time on the site. My follower count started to grow when I had a few posts that got really popular, which circulated my username and presence beyond just my immediate followers.
It started small. Most of those early popular posts were just screenshots of funny things I found on other sites, which now makes me a bit sad, because they’re not something I created. I started to realize my follower count was growing steadily because I had to turn off email notifications. (Tumblr is a terribly coded and non-user-friendly site, so notifications consist of a hodgepodge of emails and Chrome extensions and constant checking). Most embarrassingly, one of my first truly viral moments was getting into Sherlock discourse.
I learned early on that the sign of internet notoriety, just like any other kind of fame, was getting haters. “Anon hate,” or anonymous hate messages sent through Tumblr’s “Ask” feature, is a classic Tumblr scourge. But for a teen who cared only about how two guys in Supernatural should kiss, getting anon hate was a blessing. It meant someone took time out of their day to read what I said on my stupid blog AND respond. It meant I was relevant.
As a teenager, and then a young adult in college, this meant everything. As anyone going through an identity crisis at that age knows, receiving validation of any kind feels like a miracle. It’s really nice when people recognize you for what you’re saying, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. I grew up as a dancer, a musician, and a theatre kid, so not only was I bullied, and in competitive environments, but I was very used to criticism. Unless it was something I genuinely did wrong, trolls and haters didn’t bother me as much as it might have other kids.
At the time, though, I didn’t realize my privilege. Tumblr was, and still is, home to fandoms, and also to fandom’s worst elements, like racism. As many veterans of Black Tumblr will tell you, the experience of being a white Tumblr teen, and a Black one, were (and still very much are) completely different. I had plenty of bad and frankly traumatizing moments on Tumblr and other parts of the web, but it is nothing like the psychological warfare of being a Black or other teen of color thrown into the lion’s den of unrestricted fandom.
With hate (and a growing amount of praise) came my confidence online. If people actually paid attention to my shitposting and Doctor Who jokes, then maybe I could lean in a little. I started to post more about myself, and share my opinions on politics and feminism. I wasn’t a teen worried about my follower count or hiding from my classmates — I was creating an online space to be my most authentic self, which is, ironically, quite the opposite from most people.
Tumblr’s culture changed, and so did my life, but my follower count continued to grow. Other nerdy girls in college would recognize me, or my family would be surprised to learn someone they met was one of my followers. People would ask, “But what do you blog ABOUT?” and I wouldn’t know how to answer. Relatable depression memes? Star Wars? Feminism? I usually just said, “Oh it’s just a dumb Tumblr about TV shows, lol” and left it at that.
I didn’t realize my impact until people started messaging me saying they “saw” me on other parts of the internet. I was shocked when close friends, family and followers sent me screenshots of my posts (or comments on posts) that had ended up on “Best of Tumblr” Facebook pages, Instagram accounts and Imgur feeds. I had to face the weird idea that teenage fangirls weren’t the only ones who liked what I had to say.
The blog’s success ended up giving me the confidence to power through some of my darkest moments. My depression was at its worst in college, and I didn’t know where to turn. I wasn’t interested in my previous career goals, but I was at an Ivy League school and everyone around me was getting their asses in gear. I had been a high-achieving, multi-talented teenager, and now I was a depressed mess who could barely get off the floor to go to class, watching anime for days at a time as my friends launched their careers around me.
But my blog continued to grow. I decided that if my brain wouldn’t let me even get out of bed some days, I would at least give the outward appearance of being engaged. Nowadays, this is a common issue of pretending you are fine, and “branding” your best self online, which takes a toll on the healing you need to do offline. But for me at the time, it gave me the much-needed confidence I had lost. I knew I was still good at one thing: the internet. Even if I couldn’t go to class or club meetings, I could still be on the executive board as the webmaster, so I taught myself how to make websites with the skills I had learned from editing my own Tumblr blog. I created and grew Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for clubs and departments. Even as I struggled academically, I was teaching myself marketable skills without even knowing it.
As I looked beyond college, I realized that almost every kind of organization or business needed social media help, and in those days, hiring a young millennial to look cool online was all the rage (sound familiar, Gen Z?). I offered my expertise to nonprofits and startups with only my stupid blog about TV shows as a credential. I got internships and professional training just because I offered to help people learn how to tweet. It didn’t really hit me until I was graduating early, with a full-time job, that I had taught myself how to do it — all because Tumblr made me feel I could do it.
I eventually lost that job because of my mental illness and disabilities, and then was launched into the decaying job market of media and journalism, where Facebook and Google were crushing digital media into the unrecognizable pulp it is today. I couldn’t find a job that would convert me from freelance purgatory or keep me before going under for even a year until 2019, where I took a stable but soul-sucking job at a TV tabloid.
My unstable professional life (and lack of support when I was in college), meant I really only had the connections I had made online, Tumblr and elsewhere, to get me to my next gig. I branched out professionally and realized I had Tumblr followers who didn’t just follow me for my content, but for ME. They knew my name, and sent me messages, and made excited posts when I followed them back. After college I realized I had followers much younger than me who even looked up to me. For some godforsaken reason, people messaged me for advice about their crushes, coming out to their families, and my opinions on complex issues. I may have come to value my skills on social media, but I had no idea how much others valued what I had to say.
I started to have these unbelievable moments where I realized that my stupid little posts online had genuinely changed some people’s lives. A teen who said they followed me for my fandoms and funny posts said they came away from it better informed politically. Messages from people who said they went to my blog when they were feeling bad, even when I shared some of my struggles with my mental health. Someone asking out (and then starting to date!) their crush because I nonchalantly told them “why not?” Years later I use my real name and face on TikTok, where I amassed another big following, and people come into my comments every day with “WAIT! I used to follow you on Tumblr, you were a LEGEND!”
Because of Tumblr, I created a career for myself in entertainment, interviewing stars on red carpets, covering conventions, reviewing books, comics, TV and film, voice acting and advising on scripts in fiction podcasts, and even being a PA on indie film sets between the social media jobs that kept food on the table. I’ve been cited on Wikipedia, appeared on NPR twice, host two podcasts, and went from blogging about the Legend of Korra as it aired when I was a teen, to working marketing Avatar at Nickelodeon itself. One could say I did pretty well for myself with just a stupid little blog. But sometimes I still feel like I’m not making anything new or cool, and just piggybacking on the amazing ideas of others. I don’t write fan fiction, make gif sets, draw fan art, or make video edits. I didn’t even start creating my own original characters until I started playing D&D at 27, and still feel intimidated around my friends who write fiction podcasts, books, comics, games, TV and film.
My Tumblr blog, and subsequent large online presence, has brought me literal danger (I’ve been doxxed and stalked by white supremacists), and also identity and community (I finally realized I was bisexual and on the ace spectrum because of Tumblr, and even met my first queer partner there). It’s radicalized my political worldview, brought me life-long friends, professional success, and solace in dark times, but also many regrets that, because this is the internet, I can never truly erase.
But if I was given the choice again of whether to start a blog when my friend Alyssa showed it to me all those years ago, would I do it again? Yes. I’d probably give myself some tips on how to brand myself more anonymously online so getting jobs would be easier, and try to hint at teen me that “girl, you are gay,” but absolutely yes.
In the cringiest statement I’ll ever write — Tumblr made me a better person. For a long time, I wanted it to turn me into an online “star.” Now I realize it turned me into something much better.
I’m still on Tumblr daily, but mostly just reblogging gifs of stuff I recently watched. I’ve now built another following on TikTok that I’m really proud of, and created two podcasts because of it. You should check them out!
