Tumbling Toward Awareness
By Anahi Molina
I joined Tumblr for the first time sometime in mid-2012, when I was 14 or freshly 15. I had arrived there with a friend, Emma, after we’d spent a summer weekend deciding we loved One Direction. Tumblr, a blogging platform that functions much like Twitter, provided a seemingly endless stream of content. Though we’d signed up to browse pictures, videos, what-have-yous about the British boyband, we had also, incidentally, run into the beginnings of our social justice awakenings.
I quickly grew deeply fond of this style of social-blogging, where I could re-blog and like and comment on posts, and have an archive of it on my own website. My impression was that of being surrounded by other teenagers who “didn’t fit in,” cool kids who had alternative interests but didn’t have an outlet besides the internet to share them. Many of my memories of the mid-2010s are of me, sleepless with scraggly hair, hunched over my over-sized Toshiba laptop, scrolling the gentle blue of Tumblr, oscillating between outrage, shock and comfort.
Tumblr is where I learned about feminism and intersectionality, about racism and police brutality and imperialism; it’s where I first learned the phrase “social justice” (and, its pejorative sister, “social justice warrior”). As a kid who wanted nothing more than to go against the status quo, I accepted Tumblr as my alternate school, teaching me everything my public Texas high school wouldn’t. I was on Tumblr when Michael Brown was murdered, and I was on Tumblr when the Ferguson riots broke out. And when I got into a spat with my parents over what was happening, I was parroting bullet points from posts I had seen on the internet.
Scrolling through my blog’s archive now, in my 20s, is difficult. I was, as so many teenagers are, this insufferable, falsely tortured and confused kid full of longing and desire. What sticks out in my memory from those days, and from the few fights I got into with my parents, is my desire to be right. I wanted to know everything, and I wanted my knowledge to be the correct knowledge. It’s the most common experience of being a teenager, yet it still embarrasses and haunts me.
I don’t know who I would be without the exposure to leftist ideas I got in my mid-teens on Tumblr. My friends have similar experiences of being exposed to the first inklings of activism and injustice in the world through the internet. And the consensus among us seems to be that while it was often deeply oversimplified information, it was the catalyst for many of our political views today.
As much as I’ve tried to divorce myself from the cringey things I loved on Tumblr, I get the sense when I use social media now that I’m mirroring those preferences, or that I am just a legacy for them. I’m just a different version of my 14-year-old self. I’m no longer a kid hunched over a computer; I can vote, and I’m living through a pandemic, a climate crisis, an incredibly turbulent election year. Despite the toxicity of online-ness, of becoming politically adept on the internet, I’m grateful for those years; they clearly if harshly shaped me into who I am. That is: someone who is trying hard to actively use her personal politics to affect change in her own small world, who is motivated to vote in spite of the pessimistic sludge of reality, who is still figuring it out.
This essay is part of our Political Awakening series this month.
Anahi Molina is a writer and teacher based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Millions and elsewhere.