Finishing the fight?

So, I am finally done with this challenge, I was planning on doing some thoughtful, introspective and long post reflecting on how the impact and life changing moments that happened due to doing this for a whole year. However, a weird feeling got inside my head, what if missed a day?, what if I counted wrong? I started to have doubts, but all I needed to do to clear them out was run a quick command on my terminal.

ls *.md | wc -l

I have 2 small posts that don’t really count at all, I just had to take 2 out whatever the command spitted out, and I would know exactly how many posts I’ve done. I run this command almost weekly, so I thought there was no reason to be worried. However, after hitting Enter, this is what I got:

102

I decided to check again, there was just now way…

I curl’d my website, I used grep on the HTML list elementes, piped into another wc -l. The response, once again, 102.

Betrayal

I finished the challenge by mistake?, but how? where did it all go wrong? There were only a few possible reasons my count was incorrect, maybe I skipped a number at one point, realized it, and “fixed” the wrong thing, or I probably just counted the same day twice.

Whatever mistake I had made, it didn’t matter, the important thing now was looking for it, but how do I even find it? I didn’t want to open all of my files and check one by hone. I decided to do a quick search with DuckDuckGo and I found that grep once again has a solution for me, by using this useful command:

grep '#100DaysToOffload' /path/to/_posts/*.md

Eureka!, I got a list of all the strings where I’ve used the hashtag before. I piped it into a file, opened it on vim and read each line carefully, there were some missing days where I did a linebreak, but nothing too hard to check. I was more than halfway through the list, but so far, there was nothing weird. It wasn’t until I got to posts made during these last couple of months that I found it.

I realized a horrible truth, which made me see the cruelty of this world in a way I didn’t want to experience. Despite 90+ posts made and dozens of comments written for a lot of my posts. Nobody actually reads them, I have been betrayed, how can you guys let me down? How did you let me say “This is day 95 of” two times straight??? if it wasn’t because you guys didn’t even notice.

Seriously, I know I don’t write for anyone but myself, but I thought I had a small yet loyal audience, who is quick to point out grammar mistakes and typos. But when it comes to the reason I started this in the first place, none of you notice at all, maybe there was no point to this at all.

I am done…

With the joke!

Don’t worry guys, its not a big deal, if anything, I am annoyed at myself for not noticing, but it also makes for a great final post that makes me stand out a little bit from the competition who only share testimonials of their experiences and such, how boring… (I am joking too!!!).

I was done, and I didn’t even notice it. But you know what? Isn’t that the point of this anyway?, to get to a state where you don’t write out of pressure or because you are commited to it, but because its part of life, as natural as breathing.

Writing a post a week, per month, who cares?, as long as I do it because I feel like it, I could keep going, after all, this is just getting started, it’s my year one, of possibly many, up to how long I get to live I guess. Thank you all so much for this guys.

Well… This is it then. Let’s say it one last time, shall we?

This has been day 101 of #100DaysToOffload. Thanks for reading.