My Danish Heritage and Emotional Awareness

My dad’s side of the family has some serious Danish heritage and, though it’s been generations since my ancestors made their way to the United States, there’s been a handful of strong traditions and quirks that have hung around from the culture of the homeland. For example, morning coffee and snacks (or morning vittles) is called “lunch” and what most would consider lunch is actually dinner. Similarly, a proper sandwich should be open-faced on rye bread with Havarti cheese. And you haven’t lived until you’ve had ebelskivers or frikadellers- can you tell food is a cornerstone of Danish culture?

The Danish language (and others) has also massaged its way into our vocabulary over the years: Velkommen is a popular greeting and hygge is my favorite word for comfy, cozy, and peaceful. But usel is definitely the ancestral term I use most.

Usel (pronounced “OO-sul”) is a Scandinavian word with a variety of meanings. Someone deemed as “usel” might be anything from sad to useless to lousy, or something in between. At our house, usel-ness meant feeling blah, ho-hum, and being a walking embodiment of “meh”. For the majority of my life I thought that usel was a word that everyone used because it seemed to be a go-to word in my vocab for feeling so-so, but I’ve realized over the years that it is indeed a Campbell-ism. I wish it wasn’t though- usel is the perfect way to convey a feeling that I think most of us experience from time to time but don’t always know how to put into words.

If I’m being 100% honest, I’ve been feeling a little usel lately. (I wonder how many times I can use the word “usel” in one blog post?) It’s a bit surprising because things haven’t been bad around here by any means- I’m not walking in the trenches of a crisis. I haven’t been hit by a plane, train, or automobile. The fan hasn’t been hit with the sh- well, you know. I have a job I enjoy, a solid group of friends, and roof over my head. Of course nothing is ever perfect but by nearly every measure things in my world are going pretty well.

A critical eye could read the paragraph upstairs and clap back with a “why aren’t you happy?” Quite frankly, that might be the initial response I would have to someone else with the same woes as my own so it’s a valid question. But the issue here, or rather the feeling, isn’t that I’m not happy. I might be able to illustrate being the state of feeling usel if we go to the beach:

Imagine you’re on a sailboat. The sun is shining, and it’s a beautiful day to be out on the water. If all is well in your world, and hopefully most of the time it is, your sail is up and the wind is blowing you across the open sea. When life knocks you flat out, your sail is pulled down and is in a pile at the bottom of the mast, and on the worst of days you may not even go out to sea. “So if usel isn’t sailing, and it isn’t not sailing, then what is it?”

The boat of usel is going out to sea on the most beautiful day of the summer and hoisting the sail up, but there’s no wind to push you. It’s bobbing along in the ocean but not going anywhere. It’s not sailing or sinking, but just floating.

I think part of the reason the American vocabulary doesn’t use the term usel, or even have a proper counterpart for the feeling, is because we don’t allow ourselves to stay in that state very often. Americans are chronic hyper-categorizers. I have exactly zero pieces of formal evidence to back this claim up, but if you start watching closely you’ll find that many of us obsess over organizing and filing every aspect of our lives. I know I’m guilty of it: twenty different subfolders in my email inbox, sorting the DVDs in my living room by genre, and stocking my pantry shelves with an attention to organization equal to that of the local Fareway. Doing those things isn’t bad; organization makes our lives easier and is like little shortcuts for our brains, but I think we’re so conditioned to categorizing and cataloging that it carries over into areas of our lives where maybe it shouldn’t be as welcomed…

Whether we admit it or not we all mentally file our friends into a “good, better, best” system. We force ourselves to classify a day as being generally positive or negative. When it comes to our feelings we trap ourselves in a dichotomy of either happy or sad… and I get it. Emotions are confusing and sometimes it seems easier to try to identify them rather than investigate. We feel uncomfy and vulnerable, and quickly retreat to the most boiled-down versions of emotions possible: Happy or sad. Good or bad. Plus or minus. Smiley-face or frowny-face.

When I was little the Scholastic Book Fair would roll into town twice a year. We would walk down to the library where the fair was set up as a class during the school day, go around the room with a list and circle all of the books we wanted (i.e. all of them), then take the list home to our parents- marketing to children at its finest. I can recall in 3^rd or 4^th grade I wanted a book titled “Coke or Pepsi?” soooooo badly.

“Coke or Pepsi?” wasn’t really a book to read, but more of an activity book. Realistically, it was a bound packet of 1000 “This or That?”-style questions targeted at pre-teen girls hosting a sleepover. “Coke or Pepsi? Shopping or Singing? Jeans or Skirts?” You get the idea.

“Coke or Pepsi?” was a fun concept because the questions were quick and required very little thought. Each question only presented two answers so it was easy to file one option as the one you agreed with and the other as the one you did not.

Unfortunately, emotions aren’t a book of “1000 coke or pepsi questions 2 ask ur friends.” (Seriously, that was the subtitle of the book. Hello 2008!) Sometimes we feel many different things: hopeful, frustrated, and disappointed all at once, for example. Or, we might not even know exactly “how” we feel. Though my emotional IQ is relatively high when it comes to being in-tune with others, over the last year I’ve had to allow myself to recognize that I don’t always have the blueprints to what’s going on in my own head. As someone who’s used being a “feeler” as a personality crutch at times, admitting that I don’t always know how to make space for my own emotions has been pretty humbling.

I think much of my past struggle to deep-dive into my own thoughts has been due to the restriction I’ve put on myself to categorize every part of what I’m feeling as this or that- Happy or sad. Angry or excited. Coke or Pepsi. At times, it was almost as if I had to give my emotions an identity before I could truly get to know them and, in my mind, the easiest way to do that was to sort them into arbitrary, restrictive categories of good or bad. I thought that if I could give my feelings a brand I would be able to expedite the process of dealing with them.

But most emotions aren’t bad, even if they seem negative, and “dealing” with them is not a process to be rushed. They each hold a meaningful space and serve a purpose, not to be disposed of without analysis. Once I released myself from the self-imposed sanction to categorize every ounce of my thoughts I was suddenly able to feel what I was feeling, not just worry about giving it a title. As the song goes, “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name,” and giving myself permission to explore my emotions without a label has been transformational for my self-awareness and emotional recognition. I’ve realized that emotions with no name will still carry you through the desert.

These days, my definition of usel has morphed into a temporary label I use while I’m still figuring out exactly what and how I’m feeling- for when I’m on my sailboat just floating. Doing so allows me the mental and emotional space to evaluate without the pressures of categorizing, cataloging, and classifying first. I’m definitely not perfect at it, but like any new skill perfection takes time.

Sometimes I am joyful and bitter. Sometimes I am peaceful and discouraged. Right now, I don’t know exactly how I feel- I am just usel.