"special"

I have been feeling tired lately. It’s like I’m never well-rested after a night’s sleep. I have already cut my caffeine intake and have been eating well but I still feel the same. I feel old. Maybe it has something to do with finally graduating from Medicine in a month and half’s time. More pointedly, I suppose it has something to do with being another year older at the same time.

I am twenty-six years old and I already feel old. My co-clerk who sits beside me during lectures is at least 14 years older than I am and although he complains of always feeling tired he seems to be doing better than I am.

I am twenty-six years old and already my mortality is haunting me. I suppose it doesn’t help that when I used to be obsessed about death and dying I believed I would probably be dead by the age of thirty-five. Some days I like to believe that my inactivity is making me feel tired. On other days, reality hits me and I understand that laziness rather than inactivity is the problem. I have become complacent.

Every day I sit in class and observe that I’m the only one who even bothers to read my Family Medicine manual. I sit in class as we wait for professors and I use the time to read a little on the most recent outpatient case I have handled. I take this extra effort to do better and yet I feel more stupid than I have ever felt before. I will be graduating with a degree of Doctor of Medicine in a month and a half. Although this doesn’t give me the license to be smug about this small triumph I should at least feel good that I have attained something. Yet all I feel is insurmountable stupidity all because I have become complacent. I have not achieved what I should have. I should have been so much better all because I know I could have been.

Yes, I need something to pick me up before I actually fall down.

* * *

When I was driving home, I just thought of the word “special” . . . I was very grateful to have heard it again. Because we all forget sometimes. And I think everyone is special in their own way.

- The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky

february

It is the first of February. I am feeling a little sullen, nostalgic as always for the rotation when vast amounts of time were not at hand and feeling bored is not an option with the amount of work to do. I have been irritable of late, feeling a little too unappreciated and taken advantage of. People I have learned to care for make me shake my head in regret for the helping hand I have extended. Some people need helping, others just need the attention. Whatever advice or aid that can be given is wasted.

It is the first of February. I am listening to a Lonely Planet podcast on road trips, the closest I can get to traveling at this time. In April I am planning to whisk myself off to Iloilo to attend my best friend’s graduation than hopefully hop on to Cebu or Bohol. As always, the things that are holding me back are money and going around to asking permission from family.

It is the first of February. As much as I gave a sigh of relief on the last day of my last toxic rotation yesterday I flounder at the thought of having nothing to do. I anxiously fidget as the end of clinical clerkship approaches and fear the great changes that will once again take place.

It is the first of February. Already I am missing the good times.