Right now, I'm downloading more material to read for school. Goofing off, like how my dad, apparently a Spongebob fan, calls it.

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I'm not used to having Wednesday afternoons free. Usually, I see my doctor after class. (It's become a routine for me, to the point that I no longer have to explain to my classmates that I can't help with projects or join extracurriculars at that time of the week.) But for some reason, she isn't available today.

I wanted to show her something I read recently.

"I'm tired, not of working or of resting, but of me."

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
translated by Richard Zenith

By some coincidence, everything I wanted to say about myself but am not able to articulate had already been written by a man from a country far away from mine, who had been dead for almost 80 years. During the supposedly very little leisure time I have, I read the book, highlight passages I could relate to, and have the doctor read them; aside from checking for side effects of my medication, this is how our sessions go. I'm not sure what direction they're going, though, but I feel amazed at how much I'm learning about myself.

(I'll write more about Pessoa some other time. Or rather, I want to write about Pessoa, but getting to write about him and The Book of Disquiet depends on whether I remember to amidst all the other things I'm supposed to be reading, i.e. school work.)

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It's confusing, supposedly being a doctor-in-training, but having to be the patient for almost two hours every week. A psychiatric patient, at that.

Doctors are expected to be strong enough to "help other people", but I keep proving to myself that I am not as strong as I'd like to be. I'm afraid of not being able to help myself, much more be of some use to the rest of humanity. And I'm scared of is somehow getting the two roles mixed up. I already get affected by some lectures we've had (the last time was during a discussion on stress and defense mechanisms).

Someday, I'd like to be able to unite the two ideas. For now, I get bothered by residents mistaking me for a clerk on duty as I wait for my appointment.

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I'm supposed to have finished reading at least a few topics, since my afternoon was unexpectedly free. But there's so much to study, and the lectures have been all over the place recently, so I don't know know how to approach the module. Should I resort to reading the transcriptions like everyone else does? Somehow, it works for them, but I'm not able to relate the ideas if they're presented so disjointly from each other. Or is this just me being unreasonable?

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I've tried twice, and the files won't download properly. I probably should stop goofing off and move on to look for material somewhere else. Until I figure out what to do with things.