I decided to finish off this year with my own little challenge. 100 days of no social media and 100 days of sobriety. The challenge ran from September-December and all I can say is WOW, what a journey.
Alongside this challenge I also decided to start going back to church. My dad is a pastor, so church life isn’t necessarily foreign territory to me, but over the years I’ve struggled to find my own “opinion” on church, God and how that fits into my life, but I will get into more detail about this later on.
ALCOHOL
Very early on into this challenge, it became very apparent that alcohol played a larger role in my life than I care to admit. I never really struggled with it, or consider myself someone with a substance abuse issue, but I’m a single mom of 3 girls, two of which are preteens and wine definitely helps in these years! I quickly realized how often a small glass of wine was something that snuck into my weeks without even phasing me. Do I think that there is anything wrong with enjoying a glass of wine here and there? Absolutely not, but I started this challenge as a way to find myself and to do that I wanted to remove anything that would get in the way of that.
Socially this was something that was hard to avoid. It’s amazing how getting together with friends is so centred around drinking. “Let’s go for drinks!” “Let’s watch a movie with a few bottles of wine!” Luckily I have fantastic friends who were willing to meet up and do sober things, or at least didn’t razz me for not drinking. I am so so thankful for these people in my life.
Something that I didn’t expect to happen during the sobriety phase was develop anxiety about drinking. The closer I got to day 100, the more I found myself stressing about drinking. 100 days without alcohol doesn’t seem like a huge deal but I was so consumed by sobriety that I started to panic as the days went on because in reality, I actually don’t like drinking as much as I thought I did, and I definitely didn’t miss the hangovers.
To celebrate 100 days sober, I had two of my best girlfriends over for dinner, a bottle of wine and half a glass was all I needed to get the warm fuzzies. It was nice to feel so loved and supported and not overwhelmed by this lingering voice telling me to drink more. Will I give up drinking forever? I don’t know yet. I do know that it isn’t a huge outlet for me anymore. I feel like there is a sense of peace with this decision when it arises and I’m not drinking for the sake of drinking.
SOCIAL MEDIA
You guys, this is the craziest thing I think any millennial will ever read. I did not miss it one bit. It was harder to avoid alcohol than to stay off of social media. To clarify, I avoided Facebook, Snap Chat and Instagram for the 100 days. My anxiety decreased almost immediately, my screen time was down 35% in the first week and I was sleeping a lot better.
Initially when I started this, I assumed that the decrease stress and anxiety was due to not being able to compare myself to everyone and everything on the internet. I dug a bit deeper because that seems so surface level and I’ll tell you what I figured out.
The anxiety I was experiencing was from all of the self motivation crap that’s out there. “You have had a hard year but everything is going to get better, your blessing is coming!” “You’re about to see why God wouldn’t let you settle.” “If I can quit my job in 3 months to do this awesome thing, then you can too! And if you don’t, you’re the reason your life sucks!” It was this constant cloud of “life should be better” and “you’re not trying hard enough.” It’s easy to talk about instagram and Facebook being the highlight reel of everyone’s lives but I think we underestimate how the little things can add up and affect us as well. That being said, I can honestly tell you that I can count on both hands how many times I worked out in 100 days, and I feel fantastic. I only lost 6lbs, nothing to shout about, but there definitely is a love hate accountability with working out and posting it on instagram. I have been back on social media for a few weeks now and it’s amazing how quickly bad habits can creep back in. I find myself easily irritated, I’m less productive, I am not sleeping as well as I was on the break and my anxiety is on the rise.
I feared that I would miss out on connections and maintaining relationships while I was doing this challenge. Social media seems to be a main outlet for communication and event planning these days, which has benefits for sure but it became quite clear almost immediately where the deep rooted connections in my life actually came from. Which brings me to my final “section” of this journey.
GOD
I knew that if I was going to be removing some pretty big hurdles from my life, I should replace them with something. The morning after a long night of partying and an impromptu one night stand, I found myself in a cloud of disgust, frustration and depression. I hated myself. That’s not who I am, I had never brought someone home from the bar before. I reached out to friends and they ever so kindly and graciously tried to affirm that I wasn’t a horrible person and I had nothing to be ashamed of. They were trying to support me and keep me from spiralling into my world of overthinking. Something had to change.
August 25,2019 I walked into Experience Church for the first time. The temporary location of this church is in a theatre so I had no immediate fear of being struck by lightning when I walked in. The music was super upbeat and trendy, fun lighting and an extremely welcoming atmosphere. An usher helped me find a single seat close to the front, which was super intimidating seeing as I hadn’t been to church in over a year and now I’m up close. The pastor was talking about purpose that day. How God wants us as we are, and that even if we think we’re worth nothing, God disagrees. So here I am, ugly crying in my first church service, hoping that no one notices my mascara stained face and just then, I looked over and saw a familiar face.It was a feeling of peace, reassurance and a sense of familiarity that confirmed I was where I needed to be.
I little bit of a back story for you:
I met Meryl when I was 13 on a summer program called Street Invaders. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it was basically a 3 week youth missions program where we would learn to talk about God in non-awkward ways. Although we were never super close at the time, we definitely maintained a 3-4 year friendship via MSN and email exchange. I am aware that I age myself with every technological reference I make.
Fast forward to this specific Sunday, keeping in mind that Meryl and I hadn’t seen each other in about 5 years and had barely communicated outside of facebook posts, she saw me AND made sure to connect after the service. We did our best to catch up in a 15 minute window surrounded by hundreds of other people but she showed me where to grab a cookie and where to smash some plates. I know your interest in this church has already piqued because we break dishes and serve cookies.
The following Sunday, Meryl and I connected after service again and she encouraged me to join a small group. She told me that she was leading the group with two other women and that it would be a great way to connect with other women and make some new friends. I am not usually a group type of person, I prefer 1-3 people that know me, know my garbage, my quirks and limited judgement, but I signed up for the group.
Monday mornings, a group of about 20-25 of us would take over Analog coffee and talk about life, the sermon from the day before and basically give our thoughts on it and how we apply it etc etc.
Reminiscing about my first few Monday’s with these ladies has me super emotional while sipping my below room temperature coffee. I didn’t realize how much hurt, guilt and sense of lack I had deep within me. These women that I had only known for 2-3 weeks, were speaking life to me, encouragement and all around just a different level of friendship that I didn’t know I needed. To hear these other women open up about their own struggles, their pain and what they truly desire was such an honourable and humbling thing to be a part of. You see, I stayed away from church for so long because once upon a time someone with the wrong heart told me that there wasn’t a place for someone like me in church. That because I had my daughter out of wedlock that I would be spending the rest of my life “redeeming” my situation. Over the course of 3 months with these ladies, I slowly started to open up about what I’ve been through, loss, grief, divorce etc. These ladies have been a HUGE part of building me back up. They’ve cried with me, they have spoken against lies that I’ve believed for so long. God has used these women to help me navigate this new identity. Pastor Natasha said to me one Monday: “I see an unravelling for you. That you have been bound so tight over the years with this false identity and God wants to slowly peel it all back so you can truly be free and actually live.” Those words have been ringing in my ears almost daily since then. I think so often we allow the things that we’ve been through to define us, and although it seems so simple to say “I am not my mistakes”, I believe now it goes so much deeper than that. All of these years when I would reflect on where I’ve been and what I’ve been through, I was actually being stagnant. I was allowing my pain and my story keep me in one place because I truly believed that was it for me. That I am a divorced single mom of 3 girls with two baby daddies and that’s it for me. 100 days later, 53 devotionals later, 20 new friends later, I am here to tell you that is a giant pile of crap. I have tied so many things to my past. My worth, my goals, my idea of success, my idea of love. I knew I had made progress, the fact that I even went to church in the first place says a lot about how badly I wanted change. These ladies, this small group, this church and most importantly, GOD, have shifted this identity in me over the past 100 days. I set out to remove distractions so I could find myself and I ended up finding a home church, a community of women, women who are willing to come with me to doctors appointments and wait for results with me, women who come to my house on a Thursday just to pray with me and women who were willing to be obedient to God and speak life and reassurance to someone who desperately needed it and whole heartedly appreciates it. I found hope, I found JOY and through all of the digging, underneath all of the labels, the hurt and tears, I found Cass. She was there all along, always in the shadow of who I thought I was supposed to be. God sent in a team of women to help me out of this rubble and I am forever grateful. To the women of EC who are reading this now, thank you. Even if we don’t stay close over the years or our friendships change or flourish, you have impacted me and have been such a huge part of this. I feel like Bambi on ice but I’m ready to start living. I’m ready to start living the life I have been called to live.
Love and Honesty,
Cass
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