Hope, Ashes, and Closure: Ending the 100 Day Project

What happens at the end?

What happens when you complete something—something longish-term and immersive, something that has a definitive beginning and end date? Something you’ve poured yourself into that’s taken, say, a hundred days?

What happens when you start off optimistic and wide-eyed, believing in the power of spontaneous generation and showing up every day, with a plan in place for a hundred days and a plan for what to do after that, then slowly find yourself worn down by your work and your life?

What happens at the end?

Here’s what might happen: You might give yourself a break for a few days. You might write a few things you hate and throw them away. You might make stacks of notecards with ideas for a new project. You might thumb through the hundred-ish pages you wrote and stare out the window. You might question yourself as a writer and an artist.

Some days, you might lament the wasted time. A hundred days is a long time to be walking in the wrong direction, especially if you set out looking for clarity and next steps. Walking so far down a path you don’t want to follow means backtracking, or maybe cutting through the overgrowth to find a new path. Or maybe it means plopping yourself down where you are and refusing to move.

Maybe all you want to move on and pretend like this never happened.

A week ago, a friend told me to celebrate having finished something. A hundred days is an accomplishment, she said. You finished. This in response to me lamenting over what I’m supposed to do now that the hundred days is over.

It all feels like a waste of time, I told her.

Her suggestion: Find closure.

That was a week ago, and I still haven’t done it. I’ve let this project dangle in the wind and drag my self-esteem down to the pit.

What did you learn? someone else asked me.

I learned that a hundred days is too long to go without a break. That when the avalanche of my feelings starts to bury me, I need an exit plan. That I don’t want to write about my father. That I have complicated feelings about my faith.

I learned that I can’t trick myself into figuring out what to do next. If I drill down too hard, the pressure is too much. I can’t hear myself anymore.

What I need is to let the words rise up within me. Clear all the voices until I can hear that one singular voice. That voice is prudent and shrewd. It is translucent as glass. It breathes poetry and wisdom, the sound like a bell.

That voice all but disappeared in a hundred days’ time.

Here’s what I learned most of all: This project took something from me, and I want it back.

I go back to the beginning. Why did I do this? What was I hoping to get? I trace the line from start to finish, a thin trickle through a darkened brush, my finger caught in the briar.

My goals: spontaneity, loosening, imagination. I wanted to blur the lines between what’s real and imagined, like a poem that doesn’t have firm footing but unfolds in a hundred directions, each pointing to one thing: truth.

A poem doesn’t have to be factual to be true. Poetry blends the known and the imagined, metaphor upon metaphor, all of it focused on one thing: human-truth, heart-truth, a truth that makes someone else exhale and say, yes.

Perhaps, then, I should have written a hundred poems. Instead, I wrote prose. Instead, I wrote pep talks to get me through dark days and elegies for dead relationships. I asked why a thousand times, endless whys in an endless sea. I got burned out and did my best to hang on.

Did I accomplish my goals? I think I did. It just didn’t turn out as I’d hoped.

If we give ourselves up to spontaneity, if we don’t clear the path before we walk it and instead let the road rise up to meet us, we can’t know what we’ll find. What will be out there, who will we meet? These were things I didn’t know, but I had enough optimism and faith to believe that the right things would find me on the path.

And certainly they did, but I don’t intend to go farther.

So, what happens next? What happens at the end?

Do we hold on or let go? How to reconcile all the time, this seemingly wasted time? Is this coin to be turned over again and again, or should it be tossed into the sea?

My friend is right. I need closure, some finality to release me into something new.

I mention this to my husband, and he says, without missing a beat, You want to burn the pages? To which, I nod.

That’s exactly what I want to do.

We walk out to the patio, and he gathers sticks to start a small fire in the fire pit. I have the pages in my hand—one hundred and eleven of them, all marked up with highlights and comments I’d thought maybe I’d read again someday.

The fire grows enough for me to take a few pages and light them. What I’m doing, the gravity of it, doesn’t even faze me. I’m ready. I’ve been ready.

I toss them in a few at a time, trying to catch them on fire without burning my hand. I can’t seem to do that—the fire’s too hot—and I pitch them all in to avoid the pain. It doesn’t feel like much. This isn’t some big Aha! moment.

This is closure. This is release.

And just like that it’s over. The pages charred, I can still make out the words beneath. These pages of ash, all that work, gone.

This is the end. Not a question mark, not an ellipsis, but a period.

Samuel Beckett said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

It’s not a question. Beckett isn’t asking if you’ve ever tried or ever failed? You have. I have. We have tried and failed again and again.

Our hope is to try again and fail better.

And maybe, also, to let what needs to burn burn and what needs to die die, believing that something beautiful can grow from the ashes and something better can be born anew.

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Here are all the posts from the project, in case you missed them:

Writing Small: The Case for Ten Minutes a Day

The Scary Freedom of Ten Minutes a Day

Panic in the Messy Middle of a Writing Project

Productivity, Burnout, and the Creativity Cycle