What's the purpose of this post?

This post is my contribution to enter a contest by @mallorblythe which she is holding in honour of two special contest holders that helped her in her early steemit days, @curie and @newbieresteemday. The theme is pretty open, anything to do with appreciating steemit and/or steemians. This will be easy for me because, as new as I am, I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of friendly attention I have already received here. I love every bit of it and my only concern is that I miss things because I usually don't have enough hours in my day. In particular, I worry I may forget to acknowledge someone who is doing something nice for me. Ideally I would want to write an interesting, inspiring reply to every single comment I receive, and check out and enter everything anyone suggests to me. But I can already see that this is quite impossible and will probably get more challenging as my presence grows. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has taken the time to make me feel welcome, and give me confidence that this really is a worthwhile undertaking (hint: all the links will be in the next paragraph). I am soooo interested and want to learn everything, but at the same time I need to breathe and accept that I can't do everything at once. So if I did miss any well-meant, friendly gestures in the short time I've been here, please know that I appreciate all and every single one of you and I'll do the best I can. Having said that, here I am, at least I didn't miss this one particular contest which sounds amazing, and the prize is hugely attractive, so I spontaneously decided to participate (although I'm supposed to so something else right now). I heard about the contest through @welcomewagon who are also entering, so if they win I'll be just as happy as if I'd win, haha.

Source: https://steemit.com/colorchallenge/@luthorken/appreciation (is that a contest too?)

Appreciation of people

First things first. I was blown away to see lots of inspiring comments to my introduceyourself post after a very short time. Some were bots but most were real people who welcomed me to steemit. I've never seen such an array of awesome people, all different, all individual and all super-friendly. And there it appeared, my first encounter with the word contest in a comment by @honeysim who wrote very kindly that she had entered my post in a #payitforward contest by @thedarkhorse. I had to read up on what a contest is before I could answer her. In any case, I then received quite a number of additional comments from people who had found me through that contest which made me doubly grateful. Then on my second post, I met @dreemsteem whom, like @honeysim, I liked instantly. @dreemsteem has a warm and fuzzy writing style, and boy is she funny! @dreemsteem told me that she had included my post on the @welcomewagon, the purpose of which is to help and support newbies. How lucky was I? But @dreemsteem's generosity didn't end there. In one part of that post I was asking some questions about #steembasicincome and she promptly sponsored me into it. Pardon the repetition, but I was blown away once again at that. Finally, I'd like to appreciate a few more people who left comments that were super relevant and helpful such as @bashadow, @happycrazycon, @apolymask, and @josephsavage.

Appreciation of things to come

I know I have only discovered the tip of the iceberg so far. There seems to be an endless supply of exciting gadgets and features to explore and I wish I could snap my finger and just know it all. Several people have suggested to look at some Discord channel. Now I figure that if lots of people like it, it must be something good. I didn't have the time yet to check it out but will do that in the near future and look forward to be enlightened. I am genuinely excited about this whole new world that is presenting itself to me which I was completely clueless about a couple of weeks ago. I'm so glad, and a little bit proud, that I took this step when I did and didn't wait. Because from what I'm reading, the future of STEEM and steemit is looking very bright indeed. So in actual fact, I am already appreciating all the things that are yet to come and I can't wait to witness it all and be part of it! Thank you!