Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
I had spent the last year trying to say fuck less, and then I came to the Gunnas workshop and have not heard such a sustained and lyrical use of the the word fuck in a fucking long long time. I had developed the view that the more someone said fuck the less they probably actually did fuck. It’s use reminds me of people’s relationship with cookbooks, the more they buy them the less they cook. How many people do you know who have loads of cookbooks , names of celebrity cooks standing vertical on kitchen bookshelves , yet if you were to eat a meal with them it would be done in a local restaurant. Again it is like pornography, the more someone accesses it in the isolated space they call their private life, the less likely they are to have a fun fucking time with someone whose idea of fun corresponds with theirs. Generally it seems that the relationship between the saying of fuck and the doing of it is inverted. However that inversion was turned upside down today. Catherine it seems says fuck at an uncontested rate yet the way she talks would also suggest that she gets plenty of fucking action.
I say fuck for 2 reasons. The first one is that I say it in conversation with people whom I trust and with whom I can express myself in a fucking fun way. It is a pleasing experience shared with people share in the fun of it. This version of saying it does not affect the rate of doing it.
The other reason for saying fuck is not so edifying . When fuck is said out of frustration it usually pops out along with fountain of stress hormone pulsing through my body and for me stress is not an aphrodisiac. Hence not being a stress relieving fucker, this experience of saying fuck tends to interfere with the experience of doing it which is not so great for my lovely husband. So whilst I am happy to continue on with the expressing of fuck in my life I am not so keen on the stress that may come along with it.
Then I got to the Masterclass and I now have the fuck problem again. It seems that Catherine has reignited my desire to lapse back into the habit of lyrical fucking. I love saying the word fuck. I work as a part of a team of people who work dam fucking hard to support families and kids who are disengaged from school. The families and kids say it, do it, scream it, graffiti it and mumble it under their breath. I say it too and when our team chats we say it a lot. We have all agreed that we don’t like the word cunt and it is not part of the language currency of our together conversations but we all love the word fuck.
TheRe is a fucking problem however, and that is my job is changing this year, I am changing the population of people who I work with. To use the jargon I think I am on the edge of burnout. I have been working with low SES rough and tumble families who do dreadful things to each-other, yell at people who are trying to help them and then forget about it the next day. Families, who live in public housing , people with mental health issues, on no – or low income, who do gigs in the big or little house, have bad teeth and tell teachers off and generally have lots of baggage about school.
I have chosen this year though, to make a change. I love these rough and tumble people and the area they live in and this is my spiritual home, however I have felt that I needed a change of population of people who have problems that present in different ways. So I will be moving to a higher SES area working with families who probably think no-one understands how precious their children are . These are the types of families who will be demanding in different ways and who will complain to their local member or minister of education if they don’t like the service they are receiving . Saying fuck when I work with these families will generally be out of the question.
So one of the things I had been trying to do was some subtraction on the rate of the f#@king expletives that punctuate my conversational landscape. The maths on my f@#king had been going well until I came to the Gunnas workshop. Being at the workshop was kind of like coming out of a rehabilitation facility and then going into a coffee shop to find my drug dealer unexpectedly sitting at a table ready with goodies to offer me. And Catherine was that fucking drug dealer. Being at this inspirational f@#king Masterclass was like being reacquainted with the ICE addiction of my past. I am now perplexed wondering if that addiction will come back to haunt me. The Gunnas Masterclass has become my F@#k relapse and I don’t have a relapse plan.