Introducing "the F word"

Getting real, Setting the tone

(video reading of this post below)

"Fuck."

There, I said it.

The ultimate ice breaker. Fuck right out the gate of Substack #1.

The big tryout for who gets picked to join our team of vernacular volleyball. What I mean is, words are thresholds, goal lines, nets.

Wait, why the fuck am I using sports metaphors? I've never been on a sports team in my life. I've never been on a team of any kind. Never on a stage, never used a microphone, and I’ve never tried out for a single thing that would risk rejection. I grew up scared and asthmatic. (Although, I did become a writer. Big time rejection.)

No wonder, then, I came to this complex relationship with the rarified language of radical honesty. It felt unsafe to be real. Radical honesty is a love language. I love and am terrified of all its fucks and weird shit. Bratty, abrasive, forbidden, apologetic, unapologetic, riotous, hilarious. I don't want to fear forbidden words or fake my way through relationships by tiptoeing around them.

So, I’m putting my foot down and setting the tone for this Substack. Fuck!

Turns out, I get into more trouble when I don’t use my words. When I shy away. Holding back is a disrespect of the self. It’s a certain self-talk that says the way I show up in the world is incorrect, unworthy, lesser than someone else. It’s giving away my power, my narrative, my opportunity to live without the weight of layers upon layers of partially revealed identities.

I know it and I still do it. Restrain myself around someone I’m not sure I can be real with. And that feels necessary in the moment and then it feels gross when I ruminate upon it later. I'll whisk away to a quiet place and whisper "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

Repressed authenticity (the duct-taped mouths of our many interior voices) builds up and worms its way out eventually. It comes out in our art and writing.

Or does it? Authenticity in writing—the impulse to use forbidden language, push the boundaries of acceptability, go somewhere daringly new—is still often prudishly censored. We still default to social compliance, academic structure, and corporate jargon. Consciously or unconsciously self-censoring. Editors. Oh how imperialism and capitalism have choked the throats of creativity and integrated selfhood. What is freedom, anyway?

Recently I reconnected with a friend whom I hadn't seen in-person in ages. For years, decades, our relationship orbited around professional activities and academic places. In other words, we hadn't crossed that paramount threshold of "fuck".

She probably said it first. I can be such a wimp. I like wimps, wimps are cute. I want to be a cute wimp who unabashadly uses every word in the queer rainbow. And then I want wimpy-ness as fashion because queer people are so fucking tough and cute. We've been through it. We’ve been through the repression, the self-preservation, the embodied trauma, the switching & layering, the language monitoring.

What would liberation of language & throttled truth be like? When my friend and I commenced our fuckery, we found out. What glorious glowing radiation of sweet green spillage! Puddles of untreated honesty! I rolled around in it like a dog on a toad! I use exclamation points!

Do you mean to tell me you’re an accomplished professional, a PhD in fact, who uses the word fuck? You mean you eat Doritos instead of carrot sticks? And you’ll be friends with little ol’ me? I can tell you I hurt in all the ways and you believe me without question, condition, or self-referential diminishment? Are there more out there like you?

My husband has heard all my words. He’s seen my impolite and ragey. I see people right here on Substack using all kinds of great gritty words as though they have nothing to lose. I have nothing to lose. In fact, I'm gaining on it. I'm gaining on the integrated self and the full-on embrace of all that's fucking sacred in the grit.

No. Nope. That's not quite true. I've always embraced the sacred grit. I've just been too often too anxious about the potential for a provocation if I showed it. Too scared to stand in the tension it creates or that I might lose someone altogether. Hey, queer people have had to be cautious.

But lose someone? Over a word? Or the honest disclosure that I hate plastic drinking straws and air brushed rainbow poodles? Over being the first to say what we're all thinking? Over showing my truest self? If it’s even a possibility that I’d lose someone over that, why the fuck am I trying to keep them around?

So that's it. My Substack will be something like that. Where creativity and human behavior intersect. Radical acceptance in this lonely and rich endeavour of the creative calling. Vulnerability in a world of comparisons and perfections and edits.

Other things too. Video readings and image sharing. How I created a writing life in the self-seclusion of introversion and nature immersion. Queering the narrative.

If I teach something it will be incidental to a story, to real life. No Top-10 writing tips. No inane regurgitations. I've been there before. I wrote for a big-britches publication and so much of it feels like crap now. I wrote for a content farm and I don't blame myself for wanting to get paid five bucks for an hour-long assignment. Now, by the most circuitous route, trying to get my first poetry collection published. I want to pull back the sheets on that daunting and humbling process, too.

Well, stories for another day.

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