I think I've gotta let myself be that, again
Here is what I am, actually: An emotional dog lover who wants to share thoughts in clunky long social media captions.
I began the Paws and Reflect Instagram account with photos of my dog accompanied by long (I almost always hit the character limit) captions. This felt right. “Here’s a visual snippet of our life together—now here’s a soliloquy-turned-monologue with more details than you ever asked for, because language is my primary way of navigating my world.”
Then a weird thing happened, over time: My community grew. I remember the day I hit 10,000 followers—right around when I was invited onto The Canine Paradigm podcast (which was a whole other wild experience)—and couldn’t believe any of this was real. And then it grew a little more, and a little more, and a little more.
Except instead of gaining confidence, which might have even made sense—thousands of lovely people actually opted in to hear from me?!—I found myself losing it. What if you followed for one specific thing and I failed to deliver it? What if you misinterpreted what I said? What if I put too much of my identity into that social media space and then let you down… let myself down?
So it’s no secret I’ve been “stuck” for a while. I’m finally getting ready to query literary agents to hopefully publish a hybrid memoir inspired by life with Scout. I’ve been taking my writing more seriously overall since moving into our van. The social media landscape has changed drastically in my time at paws.andreflect. (Like, I remember the day reels first became a thing!!)
And I haven’t known how Instagram fits in.
Because every time I tried to sit down and come up with a plan—what does it mean to me, how do I nurture it, how do I embrace it in the “right” way—I ran in circles and never quelled the pit in my stomach. I felt anxious. I tried to create posts that didn’t feel like me because that’s what the how-to guides told me to do. I tried to be too many things at once.
But here is what I am, actually: An emotional dog lover who wants to share emotional thoughts in clunky long captions. (And then sometimes just disappear from the internet because we’re off grid in our van and that’s cool too.)
I think I’ve gotta let myself be that again.
In case you missed it
A recent post about asking vets to actually not try being Scout’s friend.
