one of the things i really like about tumblr culture is how good people are at expressing feelings

jumpingjacktrash:

i don’t mean the prevalence of (over?)sharing broad-brush feelings like sadness and anger and love

i mean the ones there are no words for, the ones you thought you were experiencing alone, that turn out to be universal once someone comes up with a way to depict them in a post

take for instance ‘cursed image’ and ‘blessed image’

it’s not that the feeling that describes is new – i guarantee you as far back as like 1978 i have looked at a picture and felt squirmy and uncertain like it changed my brain in a way i didn’t consent to, even though it wasn’t a picture of a bad or scary thing happening.

but it would never have occurred to me to even show such a picture to someone else and elicit their reaction, let alone that the reaction is a thing humanity shares.

it took tumblr’s unique combination of oversharing, relatability-seeking, and memes to stick the caption ‘cursed image’ on, say, a gas mask full of spaghetti, and suddenly we all discovered we knew EXACTLY what they were talking about.

same with ‘blessed image’ – it can’t just be any old cute or nice picture. a kitty touching someone’s hand is just a pet photo. but this

is a blessed image. i can’t put into words why. but you know it is.

i would also like to bring up ‘a real feeling’, the tumblr outgrowth of the general internet ‘that feel when’ meme

‘that feel’ goes for the obviously relatable, like getting dumped, eating food, watching tv, etc; ‘a real feeling’ goes for the stuff so niche that simply mentioning it is evocative, and that it turns out to be relatable is a huge surprise. i tried to find examples but they’re hard to search because ppl don’t tag them. it’s just like, “a real feeling is when you feed a parking meter in ohio and pretend you’re in new york” or “a real feeling is knowing how to float on your back in a pool but you can’t quite bring yourself to stop paddling a little bit anyway” – little glimpses into someone’s life that turn out to be things you’ve experienced, or can imagine so well that you feel like you have.

a lot of the posts i see going around that credit millennials for inventing some form of communication are wrong – y’all are not more sarcastic than gen x, sorry, you just ain’t – but this one? congratulations, you did this, and it’s very cool.