When you get older you start to see that there were small things you missed out on; whether you thought it was ‘lame’ or because there wasn’t anyone around to give you the opportunity. These things might be so small, so minuscule to other people, but even small things can make the greatest impact.
Being a shy, weird kid meant that there were things I never got to experience. From being picked first in kickball to having a crush like me back. I missed a lot of small things growing up. Naturally, I had put those seemingly small things on my bucket list. Not many of my bucket list items are these huge, life-changing adventures. They don’t need to be. They just need to be meaningful to the person doing them, which brings me here.
There is one game that I actually didn’t play until I was in my early adulthood. That game was charades. It’s a really simple game that everyone knows how to play, but for one reason or another I just never did. I don’t do well under social pressure. Anything that requires quick thinking and a sand timer I completely crumble. Any time there was a charades-type game where I had to communicate without words in a way that made sense to other people made me go into a tailspin.
I’m going to be completely honest; I was not little miss popular for ANY of my school years. And that resulted in a lot of social anxiety that I’m still coping with. So being in what, at the time, seemed like a high-stakes situation with people who I perceived to have hated me didn’t really put me in a gaming spirit. So, if a game like charades ever came up I always seemed to have to go to the nurse and need to go home right away.
When you get older you stop playing games; especially the ones that don’t require drinking. It was easy to avoid traditional charades for a bit. That was until I joined a friend group of 80-year-olds trapped in the bodies of stoned college kids. We would spend our evenings knitting, watching Golden Girls, and talking about how none of us know how to work on a computer. As I said, they were basically 80-year-olds.
My friends love to play cheesy games and would find new and creative ways to make anything and everything into a drinking game. Even charades. One night after a few glasses of wine and making fun of some reality show we had on in the background, one of my good friends became adamant that we play dirty charades right then and there. Luckily my social anxiety was currently taking a little wine nap, so I was on the ‘let’s play charades’ wagon. I can’t remember much of the game other than I know for a fact that any game that you hate can become fun with the right number of good friends and cheap boxed wine.
Charades being on my bucket list was one of these things that didn’t seem like a big, life-changing experience, but I did learn a lot from it. I am always in my head, especially when I’m supposed to be having fun and things aren’t that serious. The thing about games like charades is that it isn’t supposed to be this serious thing that you must be good at because literally no one is good at it. unless you can read people’s minds, you suck at charades.
Even the smallest things can make someone nervous to try. It sounds ridiculous. I am aware. If there is something that seems like a small thing you want to try, then just do it. it can turn into a good memory.
Danielle Spera Weekly 
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