I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to 10 posts let alone 100.

First I want to thank the anime blogging community for supporting me and reading my work. In particular I want to shout out four bloggers that discovered me early and were supportive of my efforts in writing reviews and opinion pieces in anime. I want to thank @Karandi, @Irina, @tcrow, and @Lynn Sheridan. Their efforts to promote and comment on my work helped me gain more confidence in blogging. I really appreciated their blogs and their thoughts that helped me get a better idea of blogging anime in general. I wouldn’t be where I am at today without their help.

That being said I had a lot to learn. The only people who read anything I had written before were my high school teachers and university professors. In the vein of thanking people I wouldn’t have even felt confident enough to write in front of the world like I do today without their guidance through the years. Even with a degree in English, I still struggle with some grammar elements in the language. I just kept putting my ideas down on paper; somehow through those ideas and years of writing papers they eventually gave me a degree. Shocking, I know.

I have never had much self-confidence in writing my own work, otherwise I would have started blogging years ago. But after years of working in the corporate world I realized that I wanted to do something that I could be proud of, and look back and say I accomplished something on my own. Jobs come and go, but the blog has been the one thing I have been able to center on while on my journey through life in the past year and a half. Thanks to the blog I have been willing to make shifts in life, willing to dream again, and not consign myself to the miserable fate that would await me if I took no action in my life. This blog has been a bright spot in my life.

But why blog about anime? Well I had originally thought I would be more diverse in my blogging than just writing about anime. My hobbies beyond anime and manga include video gaming. In fact,  I didn’t even watch anime from a young age. It was something I knew about for a while and ignored. I thought it was silly and just dumb cartoons from Japan. Now I know differently and have gone to full fledged weeb. I decided to give it a chance back in 2014. My personal circle of friends introduced me to the best animes of the season and some classics. Since then I have kept watching and have enjoyed anime for what it was. Some anime have resonated with me, and others were just popcorn filler until the next thing. Besides, I didn’t want to write a blog about 19th century British or American literature and Ernest Hemingway. I had my fill of that in school.

At the very least I can say that the blog has been fulfilling, fun, and a source of confidence in my life so far. I am hoping one day to get out of the regular work space and focus on my passion of writing. As always I plan to keep wandering until I find the next thing that makes sense. Perhaps I am going the long way about things, but we all have our own journeys to make. One thing I can promise is that I will continue to blog into the future.

Thank you everyone for your support, and as always thanks for reading.