Our hearts yearn for the freedom to be fully ourselves, to be loved, seen, and accepted as perfectly so. Yet we have been taught to fear our own reflection, to call our anxiety discernment and our defensiveness wisdom. Freedom began to appear for me when I finally felt safe enough to pause and examine those distortions with honesty and compassion. In that quiet, grace began to teach me a different way to see. Love became flexible, and freedom unfurled where fear once ruled.

So often we run from relationships that could be mutually nurturing and empowering. We project our anxiety onto others and call it intuition. In truth, what we need most is to pause and release the weight of enmeshed vicarious pain and personal trauma.

And this is where the f*cks live.

The f*cks are the moments when anxious anger rises up and blame turns on full blast, when the old fear of being unworthy grabs the wheel and drives us straight into rejection, contempt, and withdrawal.

It is the reflex that shouts, “YOU GET OUT OF HERE,” when what we really mean is, “I am terrified. I need to find safety.”

It is the reaction of moral certainty, masquerading as divine discernment while it is really just fear trying to sound holy.

That eruption, that flash of defensiveness and fury, is not proof of failure. It is a signal. It is the threshold where honesty and healing meet. The f*cks are invitations to pause, to breathe, to remember that we are not being asked to be perfect. We are being asked to stay. Stay open. Stay in peace. Stay in hope. Stay in trust. Stay to wrestle through conflict together.

And when the shouting stopped and I stayed long enough to listen, I began to see the root of it all.

The feeling of being unworthy does not sit quietly inside us; it seeks an external cause so it can make sense of its own pain. Looking inward feels dangerous because we have been socialized to believe that people who make mistakes, people who fail to be “good,” deserve judgment and punishment. Many of us were taught that to fall short is to risk eternal separation from all that is good. That belief is the root of shame and the barrier to grace.

We cannot heal what we still believe makes us unlovable. We cannot heal while we are thrashing around in blame.

The moment we pause to see this, the courage to examine our distortions honestly becomes the beginning of freedom. Self-examination is not punishment; it is liberation. Turning inward not to condemn but to understand opens the door to self-compassion. Honest reflection becomes a sacred act of reclamation, transforming inherited fear into holy curiosity. When we choose to face the distorted beliefs that shaped us, light begins to pour through the cracks, and the path to peace unfolds.

When the heart has learned to pair safety with danger, even genuine care can feel threatening. It becomes easy to misinterpret healthy closeness as control, because our bodies have not yet learned to recognize safety without fear.

As we grow in self-awareness, we begin to see how our personal distortions shape the collective we build. The healing of one heart ripples outward into the systems we inhabit.

I eventually realized that I needed to sort through my personal rules of engagement to see which ones were boundaries and which ones were expectations. Someone once said that expectations are premeditated resentments. That truth stayed with me, because resentment is the seed of contempt, and contempt destroys relationships.

Someone else said that boundaries are the things that each person decides they will and will not do. That truth stayed with me too. Sorting my boundaries from my expectations has helped me to be less annoyed and much clearer about who I am, what I will do, what I will accept, what counts as a human right, and what simply reflects personal preference.

Now I know where I can be flexible, even when the experience does not meet my preferences, as long as I am not being harmed.

In this realm, this human world where we have not yet learned to face our shadows without defending with disconnection and blame, it is so important to recognize that we have not yet collectively learned how to be gracious.

We have not yet learned how to extend grace, which is the flexibility that feels no offense at unmet preferences and expectations, while keeping our boundaries protected by love and the power of choice.

When we can finally protect ourselves with love and the power of choice, we will begin to be open to the experience of peace, the experience of accepting and even enjoying different preferences that cause no harm.

I can barely wait for us to get there together.

God is patiently teaching us, even willing to endure human cruelty so that we could learn what love truly is.

For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him would be saved.

— John 3:17

When we are finally free fucks can just be fucks, emotion full of fire and heart as we live in the grace-filled freedom of flexibility.