After years of largely avoiding his caverns, I finally decided to face the dragon of social media. I confess, I did it for his supposed treasures. There are riches of recognition and opportunity to be had, so they say, if you let the creature breath down your neck and encircle you and enchant you as you collect the trinkets.
He is a welcoming dragon. He requires only a few bits of information before he’ll let you in. The entrance is littered with small coppers that you may pick up and put in your pocket. But they get you excited and you feel sure that if you go a little deeper and take a little more time, you can find more where that came from, and better.
It’s harder than you thought it would be to leave–he really doesn’t like people to leave–and easier than you thought it would be to linger. Because there really are some things of value and when you come across one, you think “well, now, I really should keep going if he’s got stuff like this in here…”
Somewhere, there is a real hoard. Recognition. Fame. Sales. Success. Accolades. Maybe even actual connection and friendship, though that does seem a mite mythical.
But this all seems chancy. Many pan for gold in his murky waters and only a few find more than a brilliant dust. You have to give a lot more of yourself up if you want to reach the shimmering piles you’re imagining in your head.
And the ones that do find it then must keep it and that requires you to change a little here and a little there, adjust the wording, cater to the audience, provoke a reaction, or avoid a complex topic. Perhaps you need not change so far as Eustace, taking on the dragon’s very form, versed to the hilt in algorithms and seeing people as numbers, but there is a chance your forearm hurts from the cuff chaining you to the place.
Those who avoid this fate are wiser than most.
How to traverse this cavern? How to treat the other travelers you see there with unflinching dignity rather than with cynical need? How to remember that the treasures offered may buy you some bread but they are feeble in the end and must be discarded if they begin to work an enchantment, if they begin to transform you, to tell you what to do and say and how.
All this to say, I joined instagram very recently and was kind of freaked out by my sudden compulsion to check for likes and follows and what not. Still worse the worm-wyvern in the brain nagging that “you could post about this. Or this. This would make a good reel.”
Kill it with fire.
But just as I was about to tuck my skirts and run pell-mell away from that dragon, I went on a literal, actual, real-live run. After six miles and praying about all this, I realized something (was helped to realize it): this is only the first dragon that I’m going to have to deal with, and I better learn how to do it now, or I’m going to be in big trouble later.
I’m self-publishing a book. Hard work, yes, but not exactly deserving of accolades. It is something sheer will and a moderate investment can achieve. No one has to approve it. I just have to bully on ahead which is a thing I’m certainly capable of doing.
What’s to keep me from being drawn in, enchanted, and trapped in the caverns still further down the road. There will be goodreads to check. And Amazon. Barnes and Noble. Sales. Posts. Blogs. There will be a thousand slithering thoughts banging at my brain, telling me to seek here some satisfying treasure–a review, an accolade, a sale.
And I suspect I’ll be insatiable then, unless I can learn to be sated now on better fare than all those randomized dopamine hits.
How do you engage meaningfully in the lair of the dragon without being trapped? How do you keep the fog of enchantment out of your eyes?
How do you wander through, find what all that might be good or needed, and not get lost or dazed?
No, really, ye travelers who have gone before me…how?
J. L. Odom 