stop cursing

I’m still doing fairly well with this with only one slip-up in the past three days. For the most part, the curse words aren’t usually even coming into my mind as I try to keep my cool and come up with other (tamer) phrases to express my feelings.

I’m getting much better at not swearing. I’ve come up with some substitutes for things I don’t want to say anymore. Sometimes I just stop myself midsentence before I swear and that seems to work, too. I’ll need to keep up on this so I don’t revert back to old habits.

I have slipped up once today but that’s still a big improvement. I’ll keep on working on it.

I started working on this goal yesterday and have begun tapering off of swearing by trying to catch myself and stop myself before those words come flying out of my mouth. I figure there are basically two areas that I need to focus on:

1. Find “clean”, socially acceptable substitutes for the curse words I want to stop using.

2. Learn not to let people/situations get me so upset.

For starters, instead of saying that something hurts like h*, I will say it hurts like nobody’s business. I’m still working on a clean substitute for WTF??? but that will take a little more time. I want to use something that expresses the same incredulous feeling but that does not obviously sound like a substitute for that phrase. I really want to stop saying that because it is such an ugly thing to say.

I didn’t curse/swear when I was growing up. I tried it for a few days when I was 19 and decided that it wasn’t adding anything useful to my communication and promptly quit. I was careful not to swear when my sons were growing up so as not to be a bad role model in that respect.

Some crappy things have happened in my life in the meantime and even though I love my job, there are some people at work and elsewhere who can really pluck my last nerve. So, now I find myself swearing like a sailor at times. (Sorry sailors, but I was a sailor at one time and know this from experience.) Anyway, I don’t like at all that I swear and really would prefer to once again be someone who doesn’t swear. Now I need to make that happen.