When I graduated college in 2010 I came home and had no plan. It was terrifying and exciting to suddenly be so profoundly unsure of what came next. I found myself disconnected from everyone and really unsure of what it was that even wanted to do anyway. And so, I started a blog.

Somewhere around halfway between then and now I would cringe when I read old posts. It’s a blow to the ego to read something shitty and have to acknowledge that yes, you wrote it. These days it’s more a point of pride that I can look at those posts and see all the ways I should have written them differently. I’m sure that one day I will look back on what I am writing now with that same mindset. That’s how growing as a human being works.

More than that, though, it’s fun to reflect on everything that’s changed in my life. What hasn’t. I’ve written plenty of posts about falling down, as predicted. For all my feelings of uncertainty, the vague portrait I painted of what I wanted — figure shit out, travel — is an accurate summary of the last few years of my life.

I love this little blog for all the ways it helped me do those things.

Not long after I started the blog, I stumbled onto 20 something bloggers, and my life would be so different right now if I hadn’t. It’s so hard to catch those tiny moments when they’re happening. Even in retrospect, they still sound tiny. It’s only when you can see how it fits into the larger picture that you get why a simple decision has such an impact.

When I was still in that, “What am I doing?” phase, I had ready access to all these people who got it. They got it and the very fact that they weren’t part of my daily life, part of the vast network of college friends whose success stories haunted my Facebook newsfeed, made the people in this community infinitely easier to talk to. Not only that, they were people who also spilled their guts and shared all the unseemly parts of this point in life.

I’m thinking about all of this now because I just won another 20sb Bootleg. The Bootleg, this year, in fact, as they ditched the superlatives in favor of this fun March Madness style bracket. Miracle of miracles placed one of my best friends in the whole world on the opposite side of that bracket from me and in the end we tied for first place. It was truly the best possible outcome.

We had a lot of fun spending a week telling everyone to vote for the other. Or, more importantly, to support the snarktatorship, because voting Snark Squad was the only available option.

It’s exciting to win stuff, but it’s even more exciting to be recognized by a site and a group of people who have added so much to my life. I met that best friend through this site, and several of my other dearest friends too. I once got a job through this site, and that job was instrumental in getting some of the ones that followed. Snark Squad, this amazing project that is a huge part of my life, would not exist had we not found each other in that community.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration in the slightest to say that 20sb has meant a lot to me and done a lot for me.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for this award thing, but mostly thank you for everything else.