One of my biggest hang-ups in life that I’ve never been able to get past pertains to swearing/swear words.

Throughout my younger days, my father used to angrily swear at me, my mother, and a plethora of absent people he perceived as having wronged him (whether they were people he actually knew or not) during his frequent, explosive outbursts. That’s my earliest recollection of such language.

I don’t think I had any comprehension of what “obscene” words actually were or meant as a pre-teen, but nonetheless I am certain I never swore in front of my parents (or later, my wife’s parents) in my life. I don’t know if I would have been scolded or not as a kid for cursing, but anything that might get me abandoned in the woods wasn’t worth trying. And something intrinsically also prohibited me from doing so.

In fact, I don’t think I ever said a profanity at all in my life until I was in high school, and I didn’t start to become genuinely comfortable using such scandalous vocabulary in private conversations even with my closest friends until I was an adult. 

I see the world in a very polarized manner of absolutes (ie right and wrong). Since there were certain words not permitted within school that I saw other children being reprimanded for using, I quickly internalized that such words were clearly “bad” and I resolved not to ever use them (as I didn’t want to be “bad” as well).

In my middle school Home Ec class (maybe the course I performed worst at during my entire childhood—I hate any kind of craftwork to this day), I can remember myself and a classmate ratting out another student for swearing in the classroom in a conversation with someone. The elderly teacher called us up and asked us to whisper in her ear what he had said. My classmate was delighted to comply, but I staunchly refused. I was shocked that the teacher would ask me to commit the very rulebreaking offense that another student was about to be punished for. This sort of subjectivity just did not make sense to me as being logical (then or now).

It even bothered me as a kid when characters in pro wrestling, comics or cartoons would swear, even in the form of grawlixes (the word for a string of typographic symbols used in place of obscenities—yes, there’s a real word for those, believe it or not). The idea that a hero like Spider-Man could occasionally spout punishable words like “hell” and “damn” was stunning to my young self.

This sort of inflexibility is a recurring theme of my life, and not using the favorite words of every other kid in my school really made me stick out even further (although I’ve always stood out for being different regardless of my choices of diction).

At one of the year-end awards ceremonies in middle school, I won the “Citizenship” award. My classmates said they’d voted for me over more notable or popular students because they’d never heard me swear. I now realize I should have felt alienated by this, but at the time I was proud that it was reinforcing and validating my Lawful Good alignment, which became a deeper-set part of my identity. Ultimately, I think this just further “Other”-ed me and made others uncomfortable around me. But unfortunately, I’m only realizing that now, decades later. 

Even so, despite my “do-gooder” ways, I was still a teenager myself and secretly admired the freedom and rebelliousness of my classmates for their perceived wicked ways of speaking. 

I wanted to rebel against myself and my “pure and good” manner of speaking badly, but it proved to be difficult for a number of reasons. 

First, I didn’t like breaking the rules (I still don’t) and didn’t want to get into trouble. I felt that a lot of my success in school was dependent on my teachers liking me, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that by being a “troublemaker”. 

Secondly, my personal experience with cuss words at home was primarily my parents hatefully spewing them at me or each other. I hated my parents—and the possibility that I could use language in hurtful or inflammatory ways like them really troubled me. 

And thirdly (and most impassably), after I had shamefully learned to say a few mild cusses like “damn” or “ass” to myself independently during high school, on the rare occasions that I got up enough willpower to utter such a word in front of a classmate, they  generally reacted either with shock or by teasingly chastising me for being “corrupted “. 

This loudly set off my Lawful Good sensibilities and made me feel like I was doing something sinful, so I mostly gave up on the idea of using the vernacular of everyone else my age until I got to college and was surrounded by people without existing conceptions about me.

I really did try hard to imitate cursing like my classmates in college, but my informal training in this discipline went astray.

Most of my cursing “skills” developed over the course of playing hundreds of hours of Super Smash Bros. 64 with my best friend in our dorm room, where I picked up on what words were “appropriate” to use in battle and under what circumstances. It never “felt” right, though—it’s just not a thing that comes naturally to me, and it always sounds rather fake and hollow as a result.

I know all the cuss words and think they’re super cool and can say them (with some effort), but I feel like I’m missing something inside of me everyone else has that makes using that vocabulary automatic and authentic for them. When I insert cuss words, it’s like going through the motions.

Being able to throw in swear words in conversations with friends and in my dopey unboxing videos is a big sort-of-win for me (such as it is), but I feel like I’m still lacking something intangibly human. I feel dishonest having to consciously think to purposely pepper expletives into my speech (and I detest feeling dishonest).

 I am intensely jealous of other people who can get angry and unconsciously release that pent-up frustration with a good, powerful swear that comes to them naturally and expresses a negative (“bad”) emotion.  

I’ve begun to sort of accept that I just don’t have that kind of power within me, though. Even after having a quadruple stroke, being tortured in the ICU for a week and a half and going mostly blind, I still can’t find it in myself to forcefully emit an emotion-filled, vociferous curse word to express my feelings at this outcome.

Dangit.