Getting Famous On Tumblr Ruined My Relationship to My Body

In the time since being an active Tumblr user, I’ve seen our cultural standards for what is “desirable” shift so much.

I signed up for Tumblr in the spring of eighth grade. At that time, in 2011, the platform still felt like an invite-only club. My cousin, a year older and much cooler than me, had heard about it from her even older, even cooler neighbor.

It was hard to grasp the breadth of the internet at fourteen. I was often unsupervised in the family computer room, mostly clicking around YouTube or Yahoo! Answers. I uploaded grainy pictures to Photobucket and linked them to questions where I begged for validation: Rank Me and My Friends from Prettiest to Ugliest (Guess who I am!)? I followed rabbit holes all the way down to Pokémon forums where I lied about being a high schooler named Lexi, or until I wound up on gaming sites filled with soft-core porn ads. Having uncensored access to the internet felt like proof of my maturity.

When I wasn’t online, I spent my time begging puberty to reverse itself. I was often mistaken for being older than I was. The doctors blamed KFC for my first period at nine, for my body hair, my acne, my unusual height. At my best friend’s tenth birthday, held at Chuck E. Cheese, I was denied entry because “they didn’t let older teenagers in alone.” I cried alone in the parking lot until a stranger helped me inside. When my mother was sober, she wanted me to go to Curves with her because she was afraid I would follow my father to obesity. It wasn’t just my family, either: My friends’ mothers signed them up for Weight Watchers. Our school cafeterias were stocked with low-calorie snacks and diet sodas. My entire childhood was adjacent to a 24/7 news cycle of scrutinizing women’s bodies. No one was spared—even the stars who seemed to meet the impossible standards.

A few years prior to Tumblr, Facebook had already introduced a true social platform, where my audience was my family, friends, and peers. On Facebook, my friends and I learned how to present ourselves to an audience that already knew us. We began to think about how our online personas spilled into our reality—which friend requests we would accept, whether it would be weird to poke our crush from Algebra. On Facebook, it was impossible to hide. There was no way to erase my puberty from the memories of people I knew offline. If I untagged myself in unflattering photos, they didn’t disappear.

But, on Tumblr, the overlap with my real life didn’t have to exist. You couldn’t search my name and find me. Instead, my community cyclically reblogged each other’s posts under indecipherable usernames like Midnightzebra3 and Edamame_queen.

On Tumblr, the overlap with my real life didn’t have to exist.

The idea of the self as a brand, a familiar idea to us now, was still gaining momentum back then. Tumblr allowed me to be specific in what I created: What I reblogged said something about me; what I posted myself said even more. By middle school, the media I built my personality around had become embarrassingly outdated. But 2011 was the era of Hipster, the ’80s relaunch, the manic pixie dream girl. I built my new brand on these ideas. As a young girl, there was perhaps nothing more exciting than the prospect of evolving into a woman, one with so many quirks that she was worthy of becoming a muse.

By the end of the year, I’d quickly gained my first thousand followers. While my friends’ blogs were all One Direction GIFs and fandom, I leaned into the aesthetic of soft grunge. The creators I looked up to all had usernames that ended in -gasm or -hoe and uploaded film stills of themselves with stark thigh gaps and visible self-harm scars, or lying half-naked on a mattress smoking Virginia Slims. I reblogged their photos with tags like #goals, and I convinced my friends that we should be posting our own photos too.

For too long, I had been told I was mature, advanced for my age, so at fifteen I felt determined not only to prove them right but to harness my power to gain new adjectives: cool, pretty, thin. I changed my username to The-Devil-Wears-Chanel and begged my parents for clothes that would signal to these older teens that I belonged.

But mostly, I didn’t eat.

In the time since being an active Tumblr user, I’ve seen our cultural standards for what is “desirable” shift so much. In the aughts, the discourse around beauty and confidence prized thinness, but now the ideals of attractiveness have become more insidious and demanding. It is no longer enough to be thin—you need to be “slim thick,” with a flat stomach and large hips and breasts. Beyond the way one’s body looks, there is also the expectation of a specific face. Filters on Instagram and Snapchat have caused widespread facial dysmorphia. Platforms and policies have tried to counter these toxic standards when they appear: Instagram banned filters that depicted or promoted cosmetic surgery. Earlier this year in the UK, #bodyimagebill was introduced to require labels on all altered images. But that doesn’t change that there are teens who have viewed their face in apps where, perhaps without their knowledge, their lips were being digitally enlarged, their noses were shrunk, and their eyes and skin were brightened. When they look in a mirror or at themselves without a filter on, they may struggle with the discrepancy.

For teens on social media now, the prizing of certain trends represents a serious danger. There is nothing TikTok can do to stop a wave of content that presents thinness or eating disorders as trendy. They display a help number if users search for certain phrases (like “pro ana”), but their algorithm also means that you don’t need to even leave a caption or tags to receive a curated feed of your interests. If you’re fifteen and your interests are thin, pretty, likable, that can become a dangerous, self-insulating feed.

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Following my freshman year, I doubled down on my blog with the determination only a teenager running from their life could muster. I barricaded my door from my alcoholic mother, stopped completing my homework, and focused solely on creating another Alex. I only shopped at American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, and the local Goodwill. I ordered buttons from Etsy with jokes about The Smiths or punk-folk bands. For New Year’s 2013, I resolved to write a poem every day, because I saw the constant compliments received on Tumblr by other creators who wrote.

I realized that the more content I gave my followers to interact with, the more interaction I received, which brought me to the dashboards of other users. A photo of my legs in white Doc Martens quickly garnered notes, and today it has over 40,000 of them. People reblogged it with tags like #goals, as I’d once done with other people’s photos. At the time, I couldn’t imagine I was skinny enough to be #thinspo, but now it feels obvious that I was fishing for compliments at the expense of other people’s health—and my own.

A year later, I had changed my username and aesthetic again. My blog had transformed into my interactive diary. When some people from school inevitably found it, they were impressed by the size of my following. People commented on all of my selfies, asked me about my sexuality, my crushes, my writing. For the first time, my blog felt bigger, and realer, than my life.

It is impossible to gauge true influence on Tumblr. Who you follow and how many people follow you are private, but the site thrives on the perception of community. One thousand followers can garner the interactions of tens of thousands of people on other apps. By age seventeen, I had over ten thousand followers.

I had also started having frequent panic attacks. My grades began to drop; my dad would scream as I dry heaved into the trash, refusing to answer questions about school. I read The Bell Jar and Raymond Carver for fun, I wrote new poetry daily, but I never had time for homework. I was solely focused on maintaining an image of myself that I could transfer into social clout. I reasoned away the panic attacks as an anxiety disorder, as undiagnosed personality disorders, as anything other than the days I would go without eating.

I am still learning, seven years later, to accept my body.

I never directly disclosed my eating disorder on Tumblr. As vulnerable as I was about my family life, my sexuality, and my drive for social justice, saying the word anorexic about myself was—and continues to be—nearly impossible. Anorexic was an insult people hurled at me over anonymous messages. I never directly engaged with #thinspo (thin inspiration) language, but it was ubiquitous. We all knew who ana and mia were. We all reblogged GIFs of Hannah Murray in Skins, all sharp angles and wonder in her eyes. But no one admitted there were problems. I never admitted my eating disorder publicly because I felt it would detract from how effortless my body appeared—which is the very thing I came to Tumblr for. Instead, we were body positive to everyone but ourselves.

A week before I turned eighteen—a beacon of independence—I was sent to my counselor for sobbing uncontrollably during second period. In my baggy PE clothes, I finally said uncle. I hadn’t eaten in days and could not remember my last meal. I was tired. My school called my dad, gave him a list of therapists, and told him I couldn’t return until I had an appointment scheduled.

I am still learning, seven years later, to accept my body. There wasn’t an easy switch in my brain to convince me to learn better eating habits. Instead, it’s mostly been learning to let go, to stop staring at myself in mirrors, and to forgive myself.

Toward the end of my freshman year of college, a school I had applied to because of a Tumblr mutual, a kind girl with pink hair stopped me in the East Village to let me know she loved my blog. Even just a few years after I began to recover, I felt unrecognizable to myself. I laughed and thanked her. It was the start of an endless string of encounters in which people spotted me in public even after my blog became inactive. To this day, there is a version of myself that lives on in peoples’ memories, a version where I am emaciated and depressed and begging for anyone to pay attention. The most famous I have ever been is tied in perpetuity to that teenager who loved Sailor Moon and couldn’t look in a mirror without pointing out every flaw.

In a culture of influencing and random virality, I can only hope other teenagers are freed from the endless cycle of body envy and engagement validation that consumed me. I don’t know how to protect teenagers, like my fourteen-year-old cousin who is addicted to TikTok, especially as someone who once promoted an unattainable beauty standard they may have seen when they were in elementary or middle school. The cycle is difficult to break. It feels like we have gained ground against disordered eating and toward a healthy relationship to food and ourselves, but I worry that that apparent progress depends too heavily on the kinds of bodies in fashion. I report videos that promote dangerous trends, I post unedited content of myself without worrying about trolls’ comments, I eat appropriate meals and take my medicine, and, honestly, I feel a lot better. When I’m not worrying about my body, I can think and make art and accept that my body isn’t a statement. My body just is.