The Mind I was Trying to Understand

At Pampanga State University, there is a freshman who seems to have only one problem: surviving college.

A new dormitory. Five unfamiliar people sharing one room. A university that feels too big. Conversations she never knows how to start. A home she misses even when she is only a few kilometers away. An allowance she feels guilty receiving. And a family whose history taught her that love does not always mean staying.

But there is something else she carries-something she never tells people when they ask why she chose Psychology.

She usually laughs.

"Kasi broad."

Sometimes she says there are not enough psychologists.

Both answers are true.

Neither is the real reason.

As her first semester begins, an ordinary Introduction to Psychology class forces her to look backward-to a time when psychology wasn't yet the science she knows today. Before laboratories, theories, experiments, and psychologists with names she struggles to remember, there were questions.

Questions about the mind.

Questions about behavior.

Questions about why people become who they become.

And strangely enough, the more she learns about how psychology was born, the more she begins to recognize pieces of her own life in its history.

Between sleepless nights, awkward dorm conversations, old friends who know too much, new classmates who know almost nothing, and memories she would rather leave buried, she discovers something she never expected:

Maybe understanding psychology was never just about passing a prerequisite course.

Maybe she has been trying to understand herself all along.

But before she can understand the mind...

She has to confront the parts of her own that she has spent years avoiding.