Tumblr Research Paper

A teenage girl sits all by herself is the cavern she calls her room, the door is locked for the inside out where not a soul can enter. She is standing in front of the big glass mirror, looking at what she think is a monster. She stands there poking and prodding out all her flaws with millions of thoughts running through her brain. I am alone. Why can’t I be like all those other beautiful girls I see? Will I ever feel beautiful? She curls her hand into a fist and slams it into the mirror, sliding against the cool reflective surface. She gets up, turns away from the mirror and sulks over to the place she calls home. The computer. She searches through the web like any old regular day but something new pops up onto Google. A website called Tumblr. She drags the mouse over to the little deep blue shaped t and what materialized on the screen changed her whole existence.
Tumblr is a website where people can blog or post about their passions.
There is astrology, books, music, science, DIY, writing, make-up, and many other things. The vast amount of topics that people bring to Tumblr is endless. Everyday a new topic awakens onto the feed which is shared with millions of people. Tumblr has a reputation as being a website with an ever burning hatred for whatever has a pulse. Tumblr is quite the opposite. The website is a group divided into hundreds of sub-groups who share a common ground. A popular group is fandoms, which are a clan of boys, girls, or co-ed who are fans of a specific thing (music, books, tv shows, astrology, etc.). These fandoms have some of the most charismatic, kind, compassionate, people to ever surf the web. They help whoever is in need of cheering up or getting out of the darkest scenarios. They let others in with open arms and wide smiles, coaxing the recluses out of hiding. Tumblr has changed the lives and faces of hundreds of people including
mine.
I have always been a bigger girl, never what the society said was the perfect body type. I fitted in with all the kids throughout elementary school who also had baby fat. This soon changed when I started middle school here in Odessa. I had the height of Bigfoot and the body of the ghost off of Ghostbusters. As middle school continued, all the other girls got thinner and prettier while I bloated out on the weight side. The summer of freshman year, I started to work out more to tone up and it seemed to work until winter started to rear its face. My body thinks that once it starts to cool off, it means eating all food and every type of food that Mother Earth has planted on the globe. So this was a never ending cycle of losing and gaining, losing and gaining, which caused my self- esteem to jump out of my body and flush itself down the toilet. Every year it seemed that I would gain a little each time and by the end of my sophomore year I was at my heaviest weight. I looked at myself every morning after I got dressed, and I couldn’t help where my eyes wandered to. They automatically would drift to my stomach and how it look like I was a planet with my own orbital system. I would shake it off then go to school, put on the bubbly smart personality and act like nothing was going on. I always made sure all my friends were grinning like idiots while I was drowning on the inside. One day, I went home like any other plain day, did my homework like a goodie two shoes then immersed myself into what the web had to offer. I surfed on every possible website trying to find others who shared what I felt inside. I had no luck what so ever and it caused me to drift farther into the deep black space of my mind. As I texting a friend, she told me about this website called Tumblr where she blogged. She told me to get on my miniature laptop and look up this website, so I did. The website itself didn’t draw the eye of interest. There was a little deep blue t with a white trim and lots of colorful blocks with actions on them. I signed up, made an account, and started following people.
I was a huge music junkie, so I started following and looking up music tags. There I found hundreds upon hundreds of posts about music that included writings, pictures, and videos, of my favorite bands. I started gazing on other tags and found not only good but bad things. Girls and boys of all age ranges felt the same way I did but about different issues which hurt them. I knew I wasn’t alone with this feeling wedge inside my brain, others did too. All of the sudden, bigger girls blew up my screen, flaunting the body they had and happy with their appearance. I wanted to feel gorgeous in my body too just like the other girls did. I didn’t know their secret but I soon found out, two words, self-confidence. So in the morning and before bed I would stand in the mirror and tell myself that I was beautiful. It was one of the most challenging experiences so far that had happened in my life. Little by little I rewired my brain to not see a grotesque monster but a beautiful goddess. The drowning feeling was replaced by a fire of self-confidence. I wasn’t afraid anymore but empowered. I was high in the clouds and was never going to go back underground.
I am now into my senior year of high school and I have never felt more alive. I am more sociable and now in my second year at Lex-La Ray for Early childhood. When I think back to those dark times I cannot believe I would ever become the person I was today. I wear clothes that I thought I would never put near, let alone on my body. My personality has flipped flopped, I am no more the quiet, smart, tall girl who sat in the back of the class but a blunt, confident, smart, women. I now feel gorgeous and comfortable in my own skin. I have started helping my other friends with self-esteem issues. I have learned that those who act the happiest, are the ones who are fighting inner demons. Someone might think why am I all alone but no one is, it is just hard to find a saving grace. Without my friend telling me about Tumblr that day, I would still be drowning in the depths of my mind with no life line. I was an angel who had lost her grace for ages, slowing getting swallowed by the demons underneath the cracked Earth. I had given up a long time ago letting my demons get the best of me. While lying on the cracked dry ground defeated, I saw a slimmer of light. I reached my hands out to grab at the slimmer of hope. I broke the chains, crawling myself out of the dark and into the light. I became an angel again with a set of golden wings and new found grace. I finally became the person I only saw in my dreams.