F-asterisk-C-K.

You already know what that asterisk is hiding.

S-H-asterisk-T.

You’ve always known. It’s not something new. Why then did I make a failed attempt to hide something so obvious? Am ‘I’ trying to save ‘U’ from some ‘unpleasantness’? It hardly helps.

It is strange, that we say the words in full, but when it comes to writing, we try to hide their identity. We can say the same f*cks and sh*ts when we are upset or high or so f*cking happy that we cannot f*cking control our f*cking happiness, but when it comes to penning them down, we restrict ourselves.

When the words try to make their mark on a piece of paper, we put braces on them. We cannot put reins on our hands and mouths, we cannot restrain our tongues, but what we can do is to strip the words of their identity.

Words, I believe, need justice. I remember when I started writing or trying to write, I used to keep my sentences 'clean,' thinking that my words reflected my personality. Who doesn't want to show a decent version of themselves? That didn't help.

My words and ideas became 'refined versions' of my thoughts, reflecting the person I was not, but was trying to be, ruining my words, and killing my expressions in the process.

Truly, I am in favor of swearing while writing. Curses, I believe, are not bad, but are actually there to help you. Putting them on paper is one of the very few ways (or maybe the only way) we can vent and not hurt anyone, at least not literally.

After so many attempts at 'clean writing,' I have now given up on it. If I were to write a book, maybe one day, you won’t be able to see it. It’ll probably be a children’s book with a lot of sh*t (without the asterisk), that no publisher would be interested in putting the effort to replace the hundreds of damns with darns, hells with hecks, and f*ucks with... Maybe they’ll just want to erase those few hundreds (or more). I don’t hate asterisks. I just don’t like them more than my swears.

Can we get rid of the curses? Can we do without the swears? Or can we accept them, giving them the characters we’ve blurred with the merciless asterisks? We are left with two options here. We can either hold our tongues and vow not to use a cuss word, ever.

Or we can stop fooling ourselves and write them in full. The former we cannot survive with; the latter will demand a lot of effort. Let’s do this. Let’s try to write some f*cking pieces without the f*ucking asterisks. Well, maybe not!