Hmm. I feel like that phrasing might have been misleading -- what I mean by anti-growth is exactly that pattern of needing to vanish your past, disavow your previous self in order for the changes in your opinions to be validated as genuine. I've seen it directly lead to unmoored, theory-for-theory's-sake understanding of "growth" that doesn't take into account that all personal history, not just the right kind of personal history (i.e. interpersonal trauma) affects the way our minds develop.

That lack of grounding is what puts me off from talking about anything to any great depth on Tumblr, and I'm also not interested in self-flagellating in every post where I discuss the impact and breadth of my previous opinions that I now disagree with, because that shit is terrible for my self-esteem. For me, "I understand where you're coming from" and "that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard" aren't contradictory, I can simultaneously call past me a fucking doofus with bad takes on everything while recognising that that genuinely was as good as I was capable of back then. I need to know what foundation I'm building on so my current opinions don't get corrupted by the same flaws in logic that led to my original bad opinions, and the way Tumblr encouraged understanding everything in a present tense just isn't useful for me and supportive of my personal growth.

Also, yeah, commentary is definitely a defining aspect of Tumblr, and I shouldn't have implied I ignore reblog additions. I consider those original content, and was mostly talking about eliminating reblogs without commentary from my feed. I had separate tags for shit I added thoughts to and shit I didn't.