"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