MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

tumblr blues

published: 8-29-2018

Oh joy, another post complaining about why I left social media. Tumblr this time, if we’re being specific. Or might leave, if we’re being so specific that I’ll soon need to dig out the microscope from my brother’s bedroom and take it with me to college.

But I won’t, because he’ll be starting high school in a few days, and it’ll probably come in handy.

About two months ago, I made yet another Tumblr account. For my personal safety, I won’t be giving you the link. A month before that, while I was in the midst of my 8chan-fueled black hole, I’d made a different account in a vain attempt to force myself to write a diary novel about an angel sent down to Earth in order to “thot patrol” the planet. Safe to say, it only lasted about three days, and then it was quickly deactivated. Nobody noticed, because there were no followers, and, honestly, the angelkin community on tumblr probably doesn’t appreciate someone yelling the word “THOT” every three posts.

But this new one was supposed to be an exercise in working with all the quirks and problems in myself instead of against them. Accepting that I was autistic and had special interests instead of labeling them as “obsessions” and publicly flagellating myself for having them, mostly. It wasn’t meant to ever get tied into this website right here, although, since Rinea’s a dumbass, it eventually did.

More on that later.

The first few days were rather peaceful. My mental health soared. My writer’s block lifted, and I finally started work on my next book, A Lonely Signal Burns. I started repairing my relationships with my brothers (although a sort of enmity exists between us, just subdued this time). I quickly befriended someone who I’m going to assume for the sake of this post was a minor, although I suppose I’ll never know, because our last interaction was this:

“I’m not going to have WiFi for four more days, so this is the last time we will be able to talk.”

I sent a sad emoji. “Have fun on your vacation!”

“Thank you!”

Several heart emojis ensued, and then I never heard from them again.

We shared a special interest in the short time that we knew each other, and we laughed at joke posts, and we sent each other funny pictures of Poot. And although I soon befriended other people who liked many of the same things I did, this one person never came back.

And I grew very, very scared.

Soon after, I found myself embroiled in the anti-MAP community. Not a hate group against cartographers, but people striving to rid Tumblr of “minor-attracted persons”, a sugarcoated term for what is essentially a pedophile. I made a great deal of internet friends there, but eventually, seeing the same points made over and over again made me tired, and so I distanced myself from the anti-MAP community in hopes of going back to why I joined Tumblr in the first place- to satiate my autistic streak and give my recovering self a reason to wake up in the morning.

And then I found the otherkin again.

Otherkinity, if you don’t know, is essentially believing that you have a nonhuman soul inside of a human body. Whether this is due to reincarnation or some weird magic thing I don’t understand is up to the individual person to figure out. I, naturally, found myself falling into the angelkin communty, soon surrounded in my dashboard by fluffy feathers and people whining about how angel names all sounded the same. And then, soon after that, came the dragonkin deluge, and then fictionkin, and then MOGAI hell, and then a person with a thinspo blog followed me. And I started spiralling back down into the dark place I originally found myself in during the 8chan era, but instead of borderline Nazi flags lining the walls, it was “rabiesexual” pride flags and the face of that one white-haired dude from Danganronpa everywhere.

Remember how, when I had the mental breakdown mid-June, I said that I didn’t want to be beholden to the whims of a game studio half a world away? Because, while I no longer have any fears about accidentally harming myself in the name of “Paloot”, I can’t say the same about the Tumblr kin community. (Kinmunity?)

It came to the point where, every time I saw something new, a small voice in me wondered, “Am I kin with this?” And a louder voice would yell, “Are you actually, or are you just looking for an excuse to go on a reblogging spree and whore yourself out for more followers?”

To answer the question: yes. Yes, I was.

I almost feel bad for popular Tumblr accounts, by the way. Because they have thousands upon thousands of people following them, every eye watching them, they probably feel compelled to post about things that will keep those followers around, not things they they personally want to. An insular group of friends is harder to form and keep up.

Speaking of insular groups of friends, as much as I hate proprietary software, I eventually found myself making a Discord account to join a server a friend of a close online friend was pestering me to join. I went in, and it was just people spamming pictures of… otters? and complaining about anime. It wasn’t the only time I’d felt pressured to make a Discord- all over Tumblr in the kinmunity were people advertising Discord servers to discuss their kins and special interests. I considered making one in the vague hopes that talking to people on the internet about things I liked would maybe, just maybe, make me feel less alone.

But I felt more alone in that server, watching the names of people I didn’t know scroll up the screen, than I had before I’d joined tonglr.hell in the first place.

I’ve noticed, throughout both of my time here and on Tumblr, that there seem to be two different versions of myself co-existing. One that’s writing to you now, that values libre software and only wishes to be with a few exclusive people. The one that does the writing, that does the reading, that aches and burns to be a self-sufficient individual free of influence from and power under any entity.

We’ll call this version Kadaj, although maybe Kay for short is better, since, as much as it would feel good, I’d like to professionally not be perceived as a fictionkin.

And then there’s a different version. The one with the special interests and the mentality of a six-year-old. The one that freaks out at the mere mention of college to the point of having a panic attack and crying.

We’ll call this one Rinea.

Rinea makes a Discord account and promptly makes a fool of herself, and Kay has trouble sleeping for the rest of the night. Kay entertains the thought of deleting the Tumblr account that led to this whole mess in an attempt to save his mental health, and Rinea throws a hissy fit.

I won’t preach to you why Tumblr is toxic, because I’m sure you’ve already heard it a thousand times before. Accepting myself as queer was and is, in fact, a great help to my mental health. But maybe obsessing over it the whole time isn’t as healthy. And maybe maintaining a meticulous blocklist of tags for things I either didn’t want to see or didn’t care to see wasn’t the most constructive thing to do with my time, either. No matter how many variations of “danganronpa” I blocked, it didn’t stop “Komaeda’s fingers in his ass” posts from showing up, and it nearly drove me insane the same way boyband fangirls in seventh grade gave me a hate boner for a certain musical group I’d like to not ever bring up again.

It’s almost ironic, isn’t it? In real life, if someone keeps obsessively talking about something I don’t give a damn about, I can turn my head, and maybe they’ll get the point. Or I can cover up my ears, or wear headphones earbuds to block out their noise, or just walk away. But online, on Tumblr, if someone doesn’t tag their posts, there’s no escaping from them short of blocking that person entirely. And then that puts them in a position to write a callout post calling you a coward for not wanting anything to do with them.

I write books, and I want it to stay that way, not anything else. Not a person who lazily slaps pride flag backgrounds behind characters’ faces and calls it a day and then proceeds to get zero notes. Not someone who spends hours upon hours tending to a queue, vetting people to follow and reading longpost after longpost of why this and that is problematic. Making daddy jokes and borderline starting an online fight club in someone’s inbox might be absolutely hilarious in the short term, but is it really worth the long-term embarrassment in the long run?

Is the version of myself my Tumblr friends know the version of myself I want to be?

Maybe I won’t leave Tumblr again. Maybe I’ll stay. But if I stay, it’s going to be because it genuinely helps me become a better person, not because of whatever number of followers I’ve gained, not because it’ll hurt my internet friends’ feelings. If they won’t put in the effort to stay in touch on some other platform, then they were really never my friends at all.