therealljidol | (Reply)

From:

You on the other hand were the first one out on Day 11. Which was unexpected. Going into this challenge due to being in the same time zone as me and usually being one of the first people to post their entries, there was definitely some talk of you being the frontrunner. You did something really interesting and unprecedented though, you "challenged" your own entry. What made you decide to do that - and how did it feel watching the next 6 days play out knowing that your fate was in someone else's hands?

First, let me talk about how it felt watching the next six days play out. It felt great! No joke, I would have loved to have won this last immunity challenge, so I was bummed being out of the challenge, but there was also such a huge sense of relief for me. If it hadn't been day 11, I would have been out shortly after, I think, because my schedule this past week and a half or so has just been wild and I wouldn't have had a ton of time to write, anyway. The only time I really worried at all about the challenge was seeing flipflop drop with 5 minutes left on the clock and no entry from halfshell. Those couple of minutes were exciting because there was a chance that halfshell might have missed the deadline and flipflop might have won, despite "dropping" at the last second. Otherwise, I really really do not envy either of the two of them for going those extra six days.

I did come into the challenge thinking that I had a leg up because of the time zones and the fact that I'm generally a fast writer, but you never know what life is going to throw your way.

Regarding challenging my own entry, I don't know if I would have been so quick to do it if I had realized that an entry comprised entirely of photos had precedent in Idol, but at the same time, I still felt bad about dragging up something that I had done years before in an effort to make the deadline. I don't know if halfshell or flipflop put up anything that was "pre-written" like that, and I guess it doesn't really matter. What mattered was I felt like I was doing something that was against the whole point of the challenge.

I mean, I'm sure that all three of us have stuff in our backlogs that we've either posted before somewhere else or posted in Idol that we could have theoretically kept in our pockets for such an occasion ("Oh no, the deadline's coming up and I've had literally no time to sit and write!"), and it wouldn't technically be against any rules to post that, but at the same time, the whole point was "slip and you're out." I didn't have time to write something new, so it was only fair in my mind that I should be out.

I initially wanted to shift that DQ away from myself and put it into the hands of you and my fellow competitors, but I also thought that wasn't fair of me to do. halfshell and flipflop are both so nice that I think they would have let me squeak by, and I think that you would have been fine with it, too, if they had been. But then that's not really me taking responsibility for myself.

I started out this game saying to myself (and most people that would listen) that I was going to play as honestly as I possibly can given the format, and I just felt like continuing on in the challenge wouldn't have been me playing honestly and wouldn't have been fair to my fellow competitors who were really giving it their all. My hope is that that honesty will be a deciding factor for halfshell to want to keep me around for the top two, but all I can do at this point is hope that I've played a good enough game and been true enough to my relationships that I'll get a shot at winning the whole thing.

In a sense, I'm glad that I wasn't able to win the challenge, because I really wouldn't have liked being put in the position that halfshell is in right now. Sure, it's great for her because she's guaranteed a spot at the end, but all three of us have also been together for such a long time (maybe not in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly feels like we've been playing Survivor forever at this point) that she has a really tough decision ahead of her.