The Afterlife of a Fangirl

Embracing the embarrassment of online adolescence 

By Kylie Heider

It’s hard to pinpoint the feeling of returning to my Tumblr blog. It’s like walking into your old bedroom, and everything feels a lot smaller than it used to. My profile picture is from four years ago at the beginning of my freshman year of high school. My bio reads simply: “follow 4 quality art memes.” I have 577 followers. I have almost 50,000 posts. Now, my old Tumblr blog lives a quiet life on the shelves of the Internet, collecting dust. 

The archive dates back to June 2013. I was twelve years old, going into 7th grade. Most posts include the typical nerdy fan-girl content about “Doctor Who,” “Sherlock,” “Lord of The Rings,” and Marvel movies—all of which I can’t look at without cringing. Going through these posts, which span from 2013–2017, it is strange to see how much I don’t remember. It’s not like looking back on an old diary or even a forgotten MySpace; in fact, I hardly wrote any original posts at all. My old Tumblr is a series of reblogs, preserving the stream of consciousness like engagement with images or analyses or memes that I felt were important enough for me to want to keep. I know how much space these obsessions took up in my life. Now, I can’t even recall what most of them are, liking them much less.

The immaculate time capsule of my blog serves as an abounding testament to the awkward, embarrassing plights of my tweenage years. Seeing all my old influences and all the things I was once devoted to, I wonder why I ever thought they would all really stick with me. But I’m glad they’re there, if only to remind me of those bygone days from which my current self somehow meandered out of.