As one of the most popular social media and blogging platforms out there, Tumblr attracts thousands of users and viewers to its pages everyday. As a once-frequent use of Tumblr myself, I found it to be a great outlet for creative expression through sharing ideas and art with others. However, after extensive use, it became clear that many users who choose to express their own inner thoughts on the site could impact others easily, and affect them more than ever intended. As I used Tumblr more and more and followed more blogs, I slowly became more exposed to not only art and creativity, but to negativity. I myself had been fortunate enough to never have been plagued as a child with concerns about body image, insecurity, or general thoughts of negativity, nor have I ever struggled with any considerable issues with depression, self-harm, insecurity, or otherwise.
These thoughts had never crossed my mind when I first discovered Tumblr, in all honesty, and I was quite ignorant to the debilitating thoughts that plagued so much of my generation online. However, over-exposure to these thoughts and concerns eventually put them on my own mental map, and it took some time to understand these thoughts and also to get back in touch with how happy I had been with positive thoughts as my former self. During a time, at the beginning of my high school career, when I should have been building confidence and discovering more about my own identity, I was greeted with doubts that had never previously existed, as a result of my exposure to Tumblr. So while the problem may not lie with Tumblr itself, there is a problem with the media that a vast portion of its membership chooses to post. It's time for this to end.
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Depression is not a lifestyle to be attained –- it’s a daily, energy-draining struggle for those who are forced to cope with it. Self-harm is not a tragically beautiful expression of being hopelessly trapped in a fragile, poetic life. Struggling with your body image, personal confidence, and self-worth should not be a way to invite others to make you feel better, and certainly will not make you feel better about yourself. While these issues are perfectly okay to face in one’s life, and those who encounter and even attempt to overcome them should be applauded for their courage, I think it’s important to make it clear that these are not aspects of a fragile, perfect lifestyle of beautiful tears. Do not force things like mental illness –- depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or otherwise –- on yourself. Mental illness and personal struggle should not be considered a goal to be attained; to treat them as to such is to make a mockery of people who actually are burdened with these struggles and are doing their best to overcome them.
In my viewing of Tumblr, I’ve found several different types of tragic graphic and text posts, which can be seen in the following images.
1. Self-loathing and insecurity (often conveyed as jokes, in order to be perceived as relatable or desirable.
2. Fears of current inadequacy or never being good enough.
3. Negative body image.
No one should ever be trying to look "pale white" with visible "bones" and to be like "second-hand smoke." These traits are symptomatic of an unhealthy body. While many people do have body types like this, the main take-away is that there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy. While it's a cliché, it's a cliché for a reason: it's on the inside that counts. Your value as a person is completely unrelated to your physical appearance.
4. Cryptic messages about romantic love relationships gone wrong.
These graphics irritate me especially because terrible messages are displayed over glittering, dainty images of embroidery or water or appealing images - as if the beauty of an image or a craft is replicated in the beauty of the message. The message is not beautiful or worth holding onto. Your worth as a human being is not dependent on one person's view on you. A relationship that went wrong just wasn't meant to be, that's all. What happened with one person says nothing about your own value and beauty and everything you have to offer as a person. Giving your all to someone and ending up with a failed relationship says nothing about you, and should not make you feel hopeless or lost forever. You are more than one relationship, or one relationship that never even had a chance to begin. Pick yourself up and move on, because one person's perception of you is only altered by the course of a relationship, not the actual content of what makes you who you are.
5. (Often joking) posts about being overly vain and better than others.
These often contribute to people's negative self-image by trying to cover up issues instead of attempting to understand and work through them. Many images in this style often exude hostility, which is an unhealthy attitude to maintain; it offers little room to understand the passions and complications that others have, and therefore forces the people who post and reblog these images to be disengaged with their own inner selves.
6. The generalized "I'm-not-okay, and-I'm-incapable-of-changing-that" post.
The main issue with these is that they accept the problems. They embrace issues and make them beautiful and force people to feel helpless, and as if that helplessness is okay. It's okay to feel that way, but not okay to accept it. To do so is to force yourself to be unhappy, when you could be working to understand why you have these feelings and try to move on from them.
The overall message is that as a generation that is more connected online than any before us, it's important to make sure that what we post online isn't going to harmfully affect others. I want to make it clear that there's nothing wrong or unacceptable about having and struggling with mental illness; it's when people want to be sad and hurt themselves because they think that the illness makes them tragically beautiful and fragile, to be preserved forever or waste away as a byproduct of others' lives, that it becomes a problem. There are people out there who actually struggle with these issues, and many others just post this media in order to fit in with the crowd or because they find it a covetable way of life. Do not stagnate your own personal development by trying to attain an illness -- it's not a lifestyle - that makes you seem unique because your'e fragile and broken and there's nothing you can do about it. People need to stop limiting themselves by accepting and leaving these issues as they are, instead of trying to understand them and work through them. To share these posts on Tumblr or otherwise is to accept and find beauty in tragedy, and there's nothing beautiful about an online community that does that.
Don't give up yet, and don't embrace problems without trying to overcome them. No one is hopeless. If you feel this way, you should try your best to get to a place where you can realize that you are worth something; you are worth everything.
