The “F-word.” Yes, the real one. (Read with discretion)

I am not a cusser. I can still remember distinctly sitting in the computer lab in high school, working on an English paper. I slipped in my 3.5″ black disk and waited patiently while it saved, when a friend of mine sitting next to me started cussing. I asked him if he could stop. He looked at me point blank, in his anger and said, “Why? I’ve heard you say the very same thing before. What makes you so perfect all of a sudden?”

At this point in my life cussing was strictly an experimental, trying to fit in sort of thing, and I did it on rare occasions when the “right” people were around. Namely the upperclassman athletes who I had to hang with on the basketball court. I didn’t even know where to properly place a cuss word into a sentence, so I had to use them sporadically, as expletives standing on their own as a complete sentence.

In the computer lab that day, I had no come-back for my friend Danny. All I had to offer were blushing red cheeks and tears that I blinked back forcefully with strong eyelashes. He had called me out and no one likes to be called out. I don’t remember cussing much after that, at least not out loud.

I became quite good at saving up those words to use within the confines of my own head, but I always felt guilty about it. They were my secret way of unleashing passive-aggressiveness. Bottled up inside they could not be used against me. And they allowed me an outlet for blowing off steam, especially those couple of times that Tony tried to teach me the game of golf. How anyone can play that game and not become a cusser is beyond me.

I remember having a conversation with Tony when we lived in California. I was surprised and confused by a few pastors that I heard cussing in casual conversation. It was all in good fun, as they laughed and joked with one another, but I couldn’t justify their words given the context. I had learned from Danny in high school that it wasn’t worth asking someone to stop cussing, but I really wrestled with why it unnerved me to hear pastoral staff using four letter words.

It made me recall a conversation with my mom from when I was in junior high. We were discussing authors that chose to use swear words in their books. The two arguments of course were that, one: the cuss words simply weren’t necessary to make for a good story and two: some characters in a book wouldn’t be authentic unless they cussed. The character and the context defined the language, and some characters were just a bit too messy to pass as having a saintly mouth.

So is this what bothered me about my pastor friends? Were their words uncouth for their saintly persona? Did the words seem fake and flat falling off their tongue? Were they too like me in high school, just cussing to try and impress? Or was I just convinced that Christians should not cuss, chalking it up to another rule of the many I legalistically and faithfully marched by? I wasn’t sure. But it left me feeling unsettled for quite some time.

Fast forward to November of 2009 when I’m writing my novel for NaNoWriMo. One night as I’m typing away, totally a slave to the muse that is giving me word after barrage of words, my main character Elise says a cuss word. Perhaps it wouldn’t have caught me so off-guard if she had been the sort of character you might expect this from, but she wasn’t. She was seemingly pretty put-together, clean-cut, a rule follower. But her life, well, it was starting to fall apart. And let’s be honest, when life starts to fall apart faster then you  can unroll the tape to put it back together, something just snaps inside you and you start doing things you thought you’d never do. So it was with Elise.

So Elise got me thinking. Her cuss words were hidden as well. Too scared to share them out loud, the reader just collected them because he or she was privy to inner-dialogue. And I realized Elise cusses like I do. In the shadows.

I met a few times last year with a group of artists, and I shared with them that I would know I really had an authentic breakthrough in my artistic voice when I could share the f-word on my blog. (Which I did finally do here, when I subtly slipped it into a poem.) The reason I felt so strongly about this was not because I needed to be the cool kid, like in high school, but because I was tired of that word hiding in the depths of my head. To say it “publicly” here would allow a sort of unleashing of the truth, a confession so to speak. A secret I didn’t have to carry around anymore.

It felt vastly different then my pastor friends who were throwing out a few cuss words to mess with each other. This was deeper, darker, more messy then a humorous antic. This was the evidence of a life gone awry. Of a hopelessness that has to be expressed. Of a, “Oh dear God, I’ve lost control, and I am unsure how to ever recover.” The f-word has always been my word for this. It is the only word I have found that aptly expresses that haunting sense of loss. And Christian or not, that feeling attacks us sometimes. I am finding that calling it for what it is helps me to simply move on.

The word also became my rebellious word as I was trying to find myself. The word that helped me flick things off my shoulder that had no business setting up camp to harass me. Sometimes fighting for yourself takes an extra dose of vitality, and be it good or bad, that seemed to be my go to word. I would use it bravely (in my journal) to help me acknowledge the lies that I didn’t have to cling to any longer. (I suppose it’s sort of used in the vein of Julien Smith here.)

After writing that blog post in December with the hidden f-word, I felt a breath of fresh air. A slate was sort of cleared, and I no longer harbored guilt towards myself for carrying around that heavy word in my head. It was not long after that, the word begin to show up everywhere. It reminded me of how I rarely noticed a pregnant woman until I myself became pregnant and then women with swollen bellies seemed to pop up everywhere – as my waitress, as my bank teller, as the woman on the treadmill next to me at the gym. Or like when we bought a new car, and suddenly black sports utility vehicles were lining the streets. So it was with the f-word. It was showing up to me though I certainly wasn’t purposely searching for it and it was showing up in ways that resonated with my heart.

It was the word used in the King’s Speech to get him through the most painful of experiences.

Mumford and Sons, in a beautiful album, has one song called Lion Man, that bleeds this word throughout the chorus.

It was the word used in Anne Lamott’s conversion story:

“Fuck it: I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right [Jesus]. You can come in.” So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.

And the word used when she describes the feeling that becoming a parent has left her with:

But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam [my son]. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.

Here, to my surprise and relief, was a Christian using the f-word the way I always used it in my head. The word that expresses when I  feel at my end, and I have no more to give. It’s the VERY expression my heart has used to define my surrendering to God. And yes, yes I know what the word really means, and yes, yes I realize that it doesn’t paint the prettiest of pictures. But I don’t hear it in its literal sense.

I hear it as a word that circumvents that meaning and becomes its own thing entirely. A picture of all that is raw and imperfect and messy. A picture of mistakes and the need for grace to usher in…quickly.

So I use it, this f-word. I use it sparingly, because overuse of any word has a way of stripping it of its magic. I use it humbly (in most cases) to admit to myself the times I feel broken and to call forth love to shower in. I use it rebelliously when necessary, when politeness just isn’t appropriate and I have to make the lies step-off so I can find air to breathe and be myself again. I use it privately far more often then I use it publicly (I’m not sure if Tony or my kids have ever heard me say it), a personal inward expression of both humility and anger; I would even go as far to say, a prayer language, that God understands because God understands my heart and showers me with gracedrop upon gracedrop (at least it feels that way to me.) It is a mature word that is often spoken off of immature lips, and it makes me cringe when it is used with such calculated coldness or flippant frivolity. It is a word that offers so much more to me. A word that speaks to haunting regret and yet somehow always trails with grace on the coattails of its hard resounding k sound.

Tagged as: cuss, cussing, f-word, fuck, grace, hope, Messy, swear, swearing