The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
— Lao Tzu
Drengene og pigerne drikker mælk og siger “godmorgen.” That’s about the extent of Danish I have managed to learn over the past week on Duolingo. I’ve been slowly making progress towards my goal of entering Denmark with a basic understanding of the language and culture. While I’ve been told that many (if not most) people in Denmark speak English, it still feels weird to enter a country and not be able to speak in its native tongue. With this in mind, I have also endeavored to read some Danish literature (albeit in English). I just finished reading The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen and my next book is Havoc by Tom Kristensen.
While this is good preparation, I can’t help but feel a bit nervous. With a little over three days left until I venture to Denmark, I still get sommerfugle (butterflies) in my stomach whenever I think about my journey. I feel like going abroad for a semester is such an important reset in our time at college. This is a chance for us to break bad habits that have formed in the last two (or twenty) years and is an opportunity to rebrand ourselves. Even just thinking about this is so thrilling that I have been counting down the days until I am free of the commitments and expectations of college and home that have been weighing on me for some time. A tabula rasa.
With all of this freedom, there also comes the ominous notion of change, discomfort, adaptation. Most of us have a routine way of doing things and we don’t often appreciate having to change them. I’ve been lucky enough to have travelled a fair bit in my life and I have not had trouble adapting before. However, in those cases, I was living out of a suitcase and such the change was temporary. When you know the change is temporary, you don’t force your mind to break your routine and leave your comfort zone. Having gone through the process of packing up a semester’s worth of stuff into two suitcases (something I hadn’t needed to do for college as I lived close enough to drive) has triggered a new set of feelings. My heart knows that this is more than a couple of weeks in Nicaragua or Barcelona.
Though I can’t be sure of what I will face in Denmark, I’m expecting my confidence to undergo the biggest change. At home and at school, I’ve never been the most outspoken person on the block. I generally defer to others over social decisions, my wardrobe consists of mostly shades of blue, and I can count the number of times I’ve honked my car horn on one hand. I think this has come from my comparatively sheltered upbringing in rural Massachusetts and homogenous Vermont. Parental and social support has never been far away, which has left me feeling like I’ve been living and tiptoeing in other people’s shadows. For example, until this past summer, I was miserably on the pre-med track and following in the footsteps of my parents. It took me two years and several grueling bio and chem classes to finally say “enough.” This has been a pattern in many other areas of my life. I want to change that. My hope in Denmark is that I will be set free, like that moment at the top of a swing when gravity briefly releases its hold on you and you are weightless. I want to make my own decisions because of what I want and I want to escape the ever-loving grasp of my parents. I don’t think this will be a fun or easy process for me, but I’m looking forward to meeting the man who emerges from the other side.
If you are following this blog, then you are embarking with me on my travels. Any goals I set for myself will be noted here with you as my witnesses. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.
So, welcome to my journey as I start learning to Cope(nhagen)!
Learning To Cope 