My Social Media-less Life

I know what you’re thinking. How could you possibly survive a game that you’ve never been on or even seen an episode of?

Funny story… buckle up. It’s a lot of a long story… almost a decade and a half long…

For the past 13 years (so basically my entire adult life), I’ve been following this YouTube channel called Blimey Cow and I’ve been supporting what they do monetarily for 9 of those years.

When I tell you this channel got me through some of the hardest times in my life, I promise I’m not lying.
– When I decided not to talk to my mom and “do my own thing” for a whole 2 years, I watched Blimey Cow during that entire time.
– When my dad died, I watched Blimey Cow faithfully when they had a new video because they made me laugh.
– When I was going through Bible College and shouldn’t have had time to watch anything, I watched Blimey Cow while procrastinating… and occasionally got convicted about my procrastination.
– When I wanted to “get away from these people”, I went to Tennessee to meet up with them and a bunch of other supporters for two of their “Blimey Cons”.

It’s safe to say, they’ve been there through all of the times in my life. And I’ve told them this in person at both aforementioned Blimey Cons.

In fact, without meaning to make such a huge impact on their lives, I gave Jordan and his wife Sara, a kitten I found while in Tennessee in 2019. They still have that cat on their little homestead, and she regularly protects the chickens… sometimes more readily than their dogs.

It’s safe to say, our lives have intertwined in fun and unusual ways.

Now to more recent happenings…

A few weeks ago— three weeks, to be exact— the older brother who does more on their supporter site, Josh, said he was setting up a “Cowmoonity” game of Survivor. This time I thought, what the heck, I’ll probably get voted out pretty quick, but it’ll be fun to try anyway.

Friends, I’m here to tell you… I made it into the Final Three.

You’re probably looking at that picture and thinking, None of those names are yours, Erica.

And you’re right. To help mitigate any potential hard feelings because Survivor CAN BE a savage game, Josh asked us all to pick our favorite video game character as our name and picture.

I chose Link, not because I like Legends of Zelda, but because my bestest friend at least talks about Legends a lot and she’s been out of town for the most fun part of this game. So being a character that reminded me of her was my way of keeping her close.

The first week, we had 3 tribes, as they do, and one of the persons I was put in a tribe in SLAYED all of the immunity challenges and our tribe avoided tribals the entire week. Then we split into 2 tribes and I managed to stay in the same tribe with this person while we watched our original tribe all get voted out of the game altogether. By the time we got to the big Merge, it was just me and Koopa Troopa. Naturally we had already formed an alliance with each other since we had been together since the beginning.

Then the game got WILD. “Backstabbing started at 7:30am,” I told my other best friend when she asked me if she should have an earlier coffee than she usually gets. “All the coffee is allowed at this point.”

Koopa and I had planned for literally 9 hours the day before on who we should vote out and why with another player… and we found out later that other player had NEVER been for us and had been playing us the entire time.

Needless to say, shenanigans ensued from there.

We had to find more people to ally with. And we did eventually. Over the course of the next week, Koopa and I planned and planned and PLANNED. I have never strategized so hard in my life. And I used to play chess when I was younger.

It got to the point where neither of us would have continued playing if the other got voted out… but then I came up with a plan. I had developed enough of a relationship with Koopa that I knew he had no intention of winning even though he was good enough to make it to the end. He really WAS just playing to make friends. So I asked him, “What if we help Altair win?”

His response was almost immediate. “Dude, we should.”

Altair was our “second” third in our little alliance. After the original third played us hard, Altair allied with us because Koopa was pretty good at convincing the other players that he was not, in fact, playing them… for lack of a better way to put it.

The most amazing part of this plan to help Altair win was, it worked.

There were a lot of WILD things to get us from the point where I decided I wanted to try to get Altair to the end and actually GETTING to the end.

Koopa Troopa turned out to be the same man who has the cat I found in 2019: Jordan Taylor.
And of course after finding that out, I was mad I didn’t see it more than 4 days before he outed himself and resigned from the game to make way for Altair to be in the Final Four with myself and two players from the “other side.”
**side note, Jordan was the first one to find out who I was in the game because I wanted him to know who his closest friend was in the game. He was pretty excited, if all caps and many exclamation points mean anything from a guy. 😛

Once Koopa dropped out, I told one of the other two from the other side what I wanted to do and because people in the Cowmoonity are WONDERFUL people, both of the other two liked the idea and decided they would do what they could to make sure Altair made it to the Final Three.

And then we woke up on the last day of the game to a tie for the winner.

One of the other Final Three, Ori, said, “Wow, I wasn’t expecting a tie.”

But I had been. There were seven people on the jury, and one of those people voted for me… so I became the tie-breaker for Altair and Ori.

To say I hadn’t made a quick connection with Ori in the few days we were together in the Final Four would be a lie. The decision between Altair and Ori was actually harder than I thought it would be before we got to that point. Secretly I had been hoping there would be a clear-cut winner.

But then I remembered the plan.

I don’t actually know who cast that one vote (though I certainly have a strong suspicion), but I thank them for it. Because without it, I would not have been able to give Altair the reason behind why she should win. There would have been a clear-cut winner and the jury would have spoken.

Instead, I got to speak.

About a week and a half into this three-week time commitment that was an unpaid part-time job (at least for me), I realized the biggest thing about Survivor isn’t to win. “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast” are the three words around the logo. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t NEED to win Survivor. I just needed to SURVIVE.

And I did. I made it all the way to the end and helped someone else across the finish line. And in my book, that’s the best kind of winning.

In conclusion (in my defense, you haven’t heard from me in a long time; I hope you liked this story)…

I realized that the last few weeks of playing Survivor not only gave me more friends, but I learned what my “friendship” looks like to people. It’s hard to explain, because you kind of had to be there to see the shenanigans and all the planning and even the dreams and the inability to sleep past 6am even after being up until midnight or 1am the night before…

But the Lord brought it to my attention that friendship is supporting people, even those you don’t know. Friendship is still loving people even after they hurt you. Friendship is not letting your heart get hard toward a new person just because of something an “old” friend did to you.

And all of those things happened in Survivor.

And then we got to the end after the winner was announced, revealed who we are to each other, and I feel like I’m closer to those people now. We all went THROUGH some things together… we’re not going to forget it any time soon…

So I thank my Lord, Blimey Cow, the “Cowmoonity”, my family and friends, and especially my cleaning clients for putting up with my personal shenanigans over the last three weeks while I figure out that friendship is hard, but it’s ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS worth it.