Truth and Dare: Abandoning the Idea of 'One or the Other'

We are saturated in a culture of choice.

For as long as I can remember, I have been asked to choose between a truth and a dare. 

This idea formed its humble beginnings in an elementary schoolyard game. Asked to pick between revealing the answer to a personal, frequently intrusive, question or executing a thrilling dare to amuse the rest of our peers, we entertained ourselves at the expense of each other. 

Regardless of what I chose, my younger self learned the unfortunate reality that we are often asked to pick between exploiting our sense of truth or manipulating our actions to please our friends – and we almost always pick whichever we thought would cause ourselves the least discomfort. 

When it was your turn, pick your poison and try to avoid complete public humiliation. 

We make a choice – speak your truth or put on a performance – and this choice doesn’t end at age twelve. This game starts in childhood but often rears its ugly head throughout the rest of our lives. 

We are constantly asked to pick between our truth and our actions – leading to a pretty messy ‘ambiguity zone’ where we become lost, struggling to wade through the mud of being true to our sense of self and pleasing the people around us. 

I think it’s important to note that we become stuck when the ‘dare’ serves others instead of ourselves. Putting on a performance for someone else is one way to accomplish a dare.

But what if we dared each other to be our most courageous, vulnerable, authentic, beautiful selves?

What if our truth served to accomplish our dare?  What if our truth and our dare served a higher purpose than to humiliate or please?

I want to offer to you the idea that wholehearted living becomes a reality when our truth becomes our dare. Or, to phrase it differently, when our truth and our dare choose to exist in the same space and in turn elevate our sense of worth to a cosmic level of connection.

Keeping this in mind, what is our truth, and how do we dare each other to accomplish it? 

The truth is that being our most genuine selves – the person who parents imperfectly, who isn’t the best player on the team, who stays quiet for fear of being wrong, who chooses to live at home instead of in the dormitories at college, who struggles to run a mile without stopping – kicks ass. All of our imperfections completely and totally revolutionize the world that we live in.

By choosing to show up in the ‘ambiguity zone’ with all of our imperfections, talents, quirks, traditions, and eccentricities spilling out of our pockets, we cause the earth to rumble with powerful intensity. 

When we abandon the idea of “either/or”, we begin to create fervently – and what we create is flooded with creative intensity that has the freedom to be molded without fear. Abandoning the idea of ‘one or the other’, however, undoubtedly means that we are going to get our asses kicked. Creativity means that we will fail and fail often. It’s going to be dirty, sweaty, and bloody – it’s going to be a street fight. Falling down isn't a maybe, its a certainty. Get used to that idea. We are always going to be imperfect individuals making mistakes over and over again - but it is our imperative, even our prerogative - to get up and try again. 

If the truth is that courage will be both intoxicatingly beautiful and fiercely terrifying, then our dare is that we rise to the occasion anyways – regardless of how we may fall. 

There is an inexplicable sense of beauty when two things become so tightly interwoven that you can’t tell where one stops and the other begins. That sense of indescribable integration is so breathtakingly potent that it makes me dizzy. 

Let's dare each other to live out that terrifying truth of courage because we will finally be living truly, authentically, and vulnerably for ourselves and for each other.

We will create and foster a culture of integration instead of separation.

And what could be more incredible than that?