I Swear This Is Hard To Share

It’s true. I have not been totally truthful with you. And I’m coming clean today. So, here goes.

Not impressed? Maybe to some of you, it sounds silly or trite. But to me, it’s a big deal to show my true {blue} colors here. For quite a while, I’ve worried what readers – especially those who have been here for years – would think of me, knowing now that I pepper my conversations with four letter words.

You see, I’m a {slowly} recovering people pleaser. I’ve spent a lot of my life saying yes when I meant no. I’ve mastered the courtesy laugh. I can put on a happy face lickety-split, anywhere at any time. All because I’ve wanted you – everyone in the whole wide world – to like me.

But that, I’ve realized, is a losing battle. It does nothing but rob me of the chance to be who I came here to be – flaws and all. I’ve taken big steps towards living more authentically in recent years. My richest, deepest relationships are with people who happily invite all aspects of me to the table. I don’t run like hell from conflict like I used to. I’m even okay knowing nearly every molecule of cool got sucked out of me last year when I got a minivan.

Swearing has also been part of my mission to live more authentically. I used to only swear in front of a select few friends and family members. As for other folks, I’d wait to see if they cursed in front of me before I’d do so in front of them. And then I had to keep mental tabs on who I could swear in front of. What an exhausting, ridiculous mind game! Eventually, I realized whenever I did swear – to drive home a point, to provide comic relief, to add punctuation – I felt better and the people around me seemed to relax a bit.

Nowadays, I’m making up for lost time – not in how often I swear {it’s really not that much!}, but in how little I care whether others will take offense to the words I choose. Whenever four little letters come bursting out of me like word confetti, it feels like sweet relief, like I just had to get it out. That said, I’m certainly capable of self-editing. I don’t swear in front of my kids, on the radio, or in most business settings. I do have some boundaries.

And, for nearly five years, I’ve had boundaries built up around my blog. I’ve kept my posts squeaky clean because I worried that people who gravitate towards life-affirming, beauty-loving messages might be deeply offended by not-so-lovely language. And yet that’s who I am in real life – a girl who relishes meaningful moments, notices little miracles and drops the F-bomb now and then.

I dipped my toe in the water last week by including the mother of all curse words in a blog post, just to see if the world would end. To my sheer delight, it did not. No one sent hate mail or tee-peed my house. In fact, many of you applauded it…which felt like a validation of my instinct that it’s okay to share the good, but the bad and the off-colored here.

So, don’t be surprised if Little Miss Potty Mouth shows up in posts from time to time. She’s harmless, I swear. I’d love to have you by my side as I continue to uncover the magic and meaning in each day – and then celebrate the shit out of it.