baihbie.tumblr.com

15.02.2024

As a celebration of launching my new blog, I thought we’d take a trip down memory lane and look at my old one – the classic tumblr page of a miserable teenage girl.

In doing some research for the last five minutes, I’ve found there isn’t a simple way to see onlyyour posts on tumblr, without getting all the reblogged ones along with it, so now I’m on a strange website which seems to be very quickly scanning every post I ever made to find the top 10 original ones – technology these days!

2013 I was really in my tumblr prime. I would spend countless hours in my room (always my favourite place to be) perfecting the lighting for a shitty quote photo taken on my Blackberry, or editing layers of unrelated images on my Toshiba laptop, and captioned them all with some quirky symbols such as ‘X❂X❂’ or ‘✿  ✾  ❀’.

I took pride in my blog and felt ecstatic with each note and follower that came my way. My tumblr ‘theme’ and style was enhanced over time as I aged and became more confident in my internet presence. Lorde lyrics, Lucky Blue Smith, and The 1975 video stills flooded my dashboard, along with sunsets, lots of pink neon and quotes about love that I’d never experienced. It was all fantasy. But looking back through posts from a decade ago, I think I’d be queuing pretty much the exact same things if I were to be doing it now. My aesthetic hasn’t changed much, nor has my desire to fantasise. All I want to look at is pretty things – all things pink and sparkly and flowers and girls that I wish I looked like.

I am someone who has never much enjoyed living in the realm of reality – I am to this day, a day-dreamer as well as a very heavy night-dreamer. I would sleep permanently if it were allowed – I wonder if that will ever change. My teenage years consisted of very few friends, and lots of time spent lying in bed imagining a life that I’d never have. Hours spent existing in my mind while life continued to go on around me. Maybe one day I’ll learn to enjoy my real life, but reality is overrated in my opinion (that would’ve got so many notes).

Tumblr was an escape. The first feeling of creating an idea of yourself for other people to see, an identity that could be entirely false. The beginnings of the internet generation, which has now progressed to stages we never would have imagined. And here I am 10 years later, still trying to navigate the online world and continuing to feel lost in the real one.

As I look back with nostalgic eyes, I realise maybe I haven’t really changed at all. Real eyes realise real lies, as they said in 2014.

Love,

Poppy <3