What if I wanted to be a duck?

I turned off my phone and went to sleep.

By the morning, it had 15,000 notes.

The most formative moments in life happen when you’re 12 years old and past your bedtime. Knowing that your lockless door could swing open at any moment, and you’d have to execute that phone-under-pillow manoeuvre is a rush yet to be outmatched. For some it was the only quiet time they got in the day, for others it was the only time their internet friends were awake. For me, it was the freeing refuge of Tumblr.

From 2011 to 2014, I ran a semi-popular blog with a moderate audience gained entirely from making Photoshop gifs for fandom obsessives. Gradually, I distanced myself from hunting down bootleg rips of One Direction: This Is Us (2013) for a gifset and moved towards a more universal (read: more engagement) genre of blogging: shitposting. One specific night, deep into past-bedtime territory and dreading the early start of the following morning, I sent out a single shitpost into the dark blue void.

“i hate how you're just born out of nowhere and you're forced to go to school and get education so you can get a job what if i wanted to be a duck”

I turned off my phone and went to sleep.

By the morning, it had 15,000 notes.

Before even getting out of bed, I scoured the activity tab to investigate what happened during the night. Turns out the post shot into the stratosphere after a mutual with a significantly larger following reblogged it – and it showed no signs of slowing down. The notes count had doubled by second period at school. I pulled out my phone from under the desk to show my activity tab blowing up to a classmate, both of us bewildered by how such a mundane sentiment was going so viral. Throughout that day I kept checking as the number climbed, 40k… then 50k… I felt alive. 60k… then 70k… then 100k...

Of course, such thrills were unsustainable. What started as a thrilling hourly hit of dopamine quickly turned into a bothersome cacophony of notifications. It crossed 200k… then 300k… then 400k, then 500k.. then I didn’t care anymore.

Every once in a while I’ll get a glimpse of how it’s doing, like when my friend sends a screenshot of infamous Twitter meme thief @Dory reposting it verbatim. The internet meme machine is a slaughterhouse. Once a thought is sent into the ether, it will be shared in DMs, quote tweeted, screenshotted, fried, deep fried, thawed, pulled apart, and stitched together until the point of complete disfiguration. I knew I had lost it when Facebook mums started posting it alongside photos of minions and sold stickers of it on RedBubble. I felt like Jennifer Lawrence in that scene in mother!. They killed my baby and all I could do was stand by and watch.

The internet meme machine was also a factory of which I was a determined worker. As a dweeby 12 year old with a not-outstanding IRL, strangers on the Internet thinking I was funny felt exhilarating. This one taste of notoriety led to a dedication to churn out as many shitposts as I could; suddenly each thought was no longer mine to have but a potential smash on Tumblr. Many post-bedtime late nights were spent watching, studying, and understanding the Tumblr zeitgeist. What did everyone think? What were they reblogging? What was flopping? I became an ardent purveyor and creator on the dashboard, breaking pieces of my still developing brain in exchange for online currency.

By 2014, I had accumulated hundreds of thousand-note-posts, carefully combing through each and tagging them #1k to indicate the milestone. It became a joke among friends, online and off, that I was Tumblr famous. Of course, I never reached microcelebrity status, but it felt just as fun to pretend.

On October 17 2014, I deleted my blog on impulse. Gone were the years of effort I had dedicated, the online friends I made, and the permalink to the original duck post. In the years since, I have tried to archive as many posts as I could by finding reblogs through Google but it was mostly a fruitless endeavour.

Despite referring to it as ‘the duck post with a million notes’ in conversation, it has only reached 950,000 notes to date. With the rapid decline of Tumblr post-porn ban, it plateaued right before the finish line and people had latched onto reposts on other platforms instead. Could Tumblr’s mini resurgence in a post-Elon Twitter world push it across this final frontier? After all, I think the sentiment still holds evergreen because no one ever gave me an answer: what if I wanted to be a duck?