A hundred days

Wow... I'm still kind of shell shocked.  I just finished my very last entry on 750 Words, marking the final day in an unbroken chain of a hundred days, and the final word in immense sea of a hundred thousand words.  Just... well, wow.  My entry today was a goodbye letter of sorts to the site and a reflection on my experience, so maybe I'll just quote a bit of that instead of writing a whole new blog post now.

...This was an amazing experience, and it gave a lot to me.  But now this chapter is over, and it is time for the next page to begin.

You've helped me so much, seven hundred and fifty words.  You got me writing again.  I think my typing is so much better now -- not that it was too shabby before, but I can write seven hundred and fifty words faster now than I could ever have dreamed on day one.  You can tell by how long it took me to get the cheetah badge; before that I had not grown enough.  Every day I was stretched a little bit farther than I was the day before, and now see how far I can reach.

And the choices you've helped me make.  Just writing out my thoughts... helping me put them in order... you made me find the time for that, and it has been invaluable.  Just recently I came into my entry with a jumbled mind and no idea which was the path for me, but by the time I was finished, my knotted thoughts had been put to the page and I could see clearly [...] what I really wanted.  I think, even after I'm long done this challenge, whenever I have a problem I can't fathom out, here is where I'll come to solve it... And when I'm finished, after my thoughts have all been lined up straight and my nerves collected, I'll know what I should do.  And when the new page loads and I see the stats for the day, I'll see the little black icon telling me I have a streak of one.  And down below I'll see I once wrote for a hundred days, and that I once wrote a hundred thousand words, and I will smile, and remember all this time that was and that maybe someday will be again.  I enjoyed this.  I enjoyed it very much.  I feel like I can write so much more; that I can think so much more.  That I can sort out my thoughts; that writing is my sanctuary again.  Or maybe for the first time.  I thought when I began this exercise that I was refinding something I had lost, but maybe that is not true.  I've written more in these past hundred days than I likely ever had before in my life, even in the days where I was newly enamored with words and writing and all its wonders.  No, this was something new.  I was creating a new spark inside myself; setting my feet and fingers down a path untraveled.

...The last page.  I still can't believe it.  A hundred days, a hundred thousand words.  It's just incredible.  Extraordinary.  And I've been going on for so long about an adventure, a journey, an odyssey, but maybe this was my adventure all along.

It wasn't across the Earth.  It was always here, dimensionless, on this simple page of black and white.  But it was a journey through time, from 2012 to here.  A hundred days it took for me to complete it, and have I come full circle, or in a straight line?  Am I far from where I began, a stranger in a brave new world, or has my wanderlust been satiated, and I'm back home, safe in my hobbit hole?

I'm not a big believer of the cyclic school of historical thought, so I hope that it is the former.  I am a different girl than I was a hundred days ago, and a hundred days from now I will be a different girl than I am today.  That's how time works; it's one long and twisting journey, one that never stops until your final day...

Yeah, I know that got pretty hammy.  And I ramble on like that for over three thousand words.  But honestly, I was getting pretty emotional over this; I've been on 750 Words every single day since January 30th, so I guess it just kind of feels like the end of something important.  I'm really glad that I did this activity; there were days that it was my saving grace and days that I felt it was the worst thing in the world, but all in all, it was an amazing experience that helped me improve my writing and typing, engage my creative side, and reflect on all the things that would otherwise just be left jumbled up in my mind.  It's well worth a little bit of ham.