The Password-Protected Cattiness of Private Tumblrs
Teenage girls and secrets – what could go wrong?
If coming of age means firsts, then I experienced mine in tandem with the internet. My first time behind the wheel, my first shot of paint-peeling vodka and my first moments of parental disillusionment are inextricably tied to the internet’s journey from infancy to maturity. The first YouTube link I ever got, from a friend who wanted to show me a recording of her figure skating routine. The thrill of seeing a crush like and comment on my Facebook profile picture for the first time. The unbridled chaos of Omegle, which shocked so many preteens of the mid-aughts with their first unbidden glimpse of a stranger’s penis.
The world I could access online felt like it was remaking itself daily, and myself along with it. The internet refracted the construction of my own self-image into a multi-platform project. Who was I on Instagram? On Tumblr? On Snapchat? The reach of the internet’s ever-expanding horizon was as obscure to me as the increasingly unrecognizable terrain of my body and mind, but there was relief to be found in the not knowing. Here were others behind their own doors slammed shut who just wanted someone to tell them that their fantasies, resentments and anxieties were every bit as earth-shattering as they felt.
But my impulses, and those of the internet, haven’t always hewed so closely to the wholesome. The flip side of the coin was an appetite for drama and casual cruelty. And no digital discovery was quite as tempting or as suited to the purposes of teenage girls as the password-protected Tumblr.
For as long as I can remember, Tumblr has been a lawless internet space. In its heyday, there was no telling what unholy discourse would be unleashed on your dashboard. Maybe it was DashCon, AKA the Fyre Festival of Tumblr, which was a doomed attempt at a Tumblr fan convention (that wasn’t even technically affiliated with Tumblr) whose organizers allegedly crowdsourced around $17,000 for what added up to some fans, no celebrities and a ball pit the size of a kiddie pool in an otherwise empty concession hall. Or it was Cole Sprouse declaring his stint on Tumblr a “social experiment” and insulting his betrayed followers, setting off a wave of Why Cole Sprouse Is Problematic text posts that lasted weeks. If you were lucky, you might have even witnessed the saga of the grave-robbing, bone-stealing witch.
So it made sense that the developers would include an option for users who didn’t want everything they shared to be available to the rest of the heathens roaming Tumblr. The logic of a private Tumblr is simple: create a URL, choose a password and share both with whomever you deem worthy. In the hands of girls at my high school, however, the private Tumblr feature became the virtual theater for a comedy of manners in which we played the starring roles. Now Showing: Password-Protected Cattiness.
When I searched for the phrase “private pass” in my Facebook messages, I received 34 results spread out among a handful of different friend combinations. In groups of two to three people or in direct messages, my friends and I shared new URLs and passwords with each other every couple of months. Sometimes we cited specific reasons for the updates (“New link for my two favorites only! Password is ‘best friend’”) and sometimes the latest version of the password came only with the reminder/warning/plea: “you guys are the only ones with the pass.”
Most of the links I found in my messages led to the same error message from Tumblr alerting me that the page I was looking for no longer exists. I imagine the deletions probably occurred shortly after we graduated from high school, to avoid this precise situation – a former friend stumbling upon long-buried resentments – or perhaps simply to wash away any trace of potentially embarrassing digital footprints. The distance of years may have dulled the details of what they posted, but I distinctly remember the rush of being anointed a Chosen Friend.
This exclusivity was catnip for teens who dealt in secrets and power trips. So, naturally, passwords that weren’t ours to share became a hot commodity – the tools with which we committed virtual breaking and entering. Ever-shifting loyalties meant that at any point, the rug could be pulled out from under you and suddenly everyone would figure out who you liked and the stupid codename you picked for your crush. Or the girls who got really close over the summer and left you the odd one out would find out how upset you were about it and joke about your desperation to be included behind your back. The fallout of these online negotiations bled into our face-to-face realities, often without a single word uttered aloud.
In one memorable instance, I learned that someone I’d only ever spoken to a few times had apparently hated me for years because she found me to be, and I quote, “annoying, rude and just a bitch.” I can cite the exact wording because the full post, in which she cited a laundry list of real names and insults, is pasted in a Facebook group message consisting of every person she shit on – plus one friend who was in possession of the password at the time. She, of course, was spared by the diatribe, but the temptation to share what she’d read with the rest of us must have proved too great in the end.
Judging from the number of keyboard smashes in that group message, I’d say sheer entertainment value drowned out any guilt we might have felt in violating someone’s trust and privacy. After all, it’s not everyday that you find out you’ve been unknowingly cast as a minor villain in someone else’s story. And at the time, my excuse probably would’ve been (predictably) that it’s not like everyone else wasn’t doing the same thing. Paranoia about whose hands your password might have fallen into was a significant part of why we changed them so frequently. If you really wanted to keep your cards close to your chest, the logic went, then you should’ve been more cryptic about it so nobody could be sure what or who you were talking about.
The heart of the issue is that we were rarely using the private Tumblr function as it was intended – to create safe spaces where vulnerability and honesty weren’t punished, mocked or taken advantage of. Instead, we put on a performance of intimacy, an elaborate charade that passed off passwords as tokens of trust when in actuality they sowed seeds of suspicion. If you come to confession but mask everything in euphemisms because there’s a risk that the entire congregation is listening on the other side of the curtain, it defeats the premise of the exercise. You’d leave just as burdened and anxious as you arrived.
Most of my friends and former classmates have deleted their private blogs, but I never got around to doing the same. On the infrequent occasions that I remember its existence, I find myself hesitating to wipe out the evidence of the simmering volatility and hunger that churned underneath the surface of a mostly well-behaved teenage girl. By the time I reached senior year, I had stopped vague blogging about frenemies in favor of updates about my college search and family that were by turns nihilistic, righteous and naive. Maybe I was growing out of my penchant for stirring up drama, or maybe I’ve simply lost the ability to read between the lines I myself penned. As sporadic and wrapped in innuendo as it might be, the password-protected Tumblr is still a record of my life at the time (I have not once been able to write in a diary for longer than a week) and with every passing year, I feel less and less connected to the person I was then. One day, when I look back, will I find my own motivations and fears inscrutable?
For now, I can still locate some of myself in those posts (the suffocation of organized religion when you aren’t allowed to choose it for yourself is just as relevant to my life today, unfortunately) while recognizing how much I’ve grown in the interim (in retrospect, my AP U.S. History teacher was absolutely not worth the veritable waterfall of lust I directed his way). I’m the youngest in my family, but scrolling through my former stream of consciousness, I think this is what it might feel like to have a little sister – to want to give her the answers she seeks and make sure she knows she’s not alone, to harbor this mix of compassion, frustration and pride in her.
One thing’s for sure: she’d be unbearably smug about the fact that I couldn’t guess my own password, no matter how many times I tried. In the end, I had to resort to finding a Facebook message I sent to a few of my friends circa 2012, with a pointed postscript: “new pass – delete this message after you see it!”