Truth.

Did you ever play truth or dare as a kid?

At sleep overs, all your friends sitting in a circle, an empty soda bottle in the center, the building anxiety over who it would land on next, trying to decide ahead of time - just in case it landed on you - if you'd pick truth or dare.

When we were little, we all picked dare.

It was exciting, being dared to do something crazy. Run outside with no pants on and scream "I LOVE BUTTER!" at the top of your lungs. Put an ice cube in your bra and keep it there for 30 seconds. Call the boy you have a crush on and ask him something weird, or worse: tell him you like him.

Hearts pounding, hands sweating, hoping our friends would be kind and not make us do anything truly awful {which they never were}, we always picked dare.

I mean, what great truths did we have to reveal when we were 10 anyway?

I wet the bed once?

I steal cookies?

Sometimes I wonder if 5th grade is all it was cracked up to be?

No.

We had nothing.

As I got older, the game was still played, but usually between me and a girlfriend who was staying over, laying in bed in the dark talking until we fell asleep. And we always picked truth,

Maybe we played to pass the time.

Maybe we played because it was a good veil under which we could ask personal questions without being nosy.

Maybe we played because we had questions we secretly wanted to be asked. Truths we secretly wanted to share, but didn't know how.

So we opened the door. The rules were, after all, that they could ask anything and you had to answer honestly.

It's like what psychiatrists always say about having a journal: you're writing it because you want someone to read it. You want it to be found, read through and known about. You want to share yourself, you just don't know how to come out and do it.

Playing truth or dare did it for us.

Want to hear my truth?

Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing, here. I worry about how I'm raising the kids, if I'm doing a good enough job, what I'll be dealing with when they're 18. What issues they'll have that I know will be my fault. I don't know if I'm enough.

Sometimes I'm equal parts scared of, excited about and apathetic toward the future. It's very confusing.

Sometimes I wish mistakes were more easily forgotten. I wish that at some point people stopped seeing your poor choices when they looked at you. Like every day when we woke up, we forgot all the sins of the day before, and we only remembered what was good, what was real, what was intentional.

I fucking hate mopping.

I un-friended someone on Facebook the other day for posting too many political statuses and pictures of Obama. Judge me, I don't care. I don't feel bad about it at all. 

When I was little, I used to break the candy bars that are in those metal racks in the check out line. I wouldn't break the wrapper, so nobody would know until they bought it and opened it and saw their candy bar was fatally decapitated. I don't know why I did it. I'd just stand there and squeeze them until they snapped in half, then I'd move on to another one, seeing how many I could break before we were done checking out and paying for our groceries.

I still feel bad for all the people who got broken candy bars.

Anyway, your turn. Truth or Dare?