Humility, Commas, and Going Back to University at 47
Why going back to uni in midlife has made me less judgy, more open, and considerably more emotionally reactive about punctuation.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about humility.
Not humiliation. Nor making yourself small in an effort to prevent others from feeling uncomfortable. I mean something softer and more honest than that.
I mean the ability to stay open. To stay teachable. To keep remembering that no matter how much you learn in life, there will always be enormous things you do not yet understand.
And honestly, I don’t think I really understood that properly before I started my Adult Nursing degree aged 47 in September 2024.
One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this so much recently is because I feel really worried by a growing cultural attitude that university education is somehow pointless now. Or elitist. Or unnecessary. Or beneath people who consider themselves “real world” thinkers.
Especially when it comes to arts and humanities subjects. I hear it more and more.
A few weeks ago I was talking to somebody I care about deeply and she said something along the lines of, “Why would anyone want to go to university? It’s just full of ‘thickos’ and babies straight out of school.”
And I remember laughing a bit uncomfortably because, firstly, once upon a time we were the babies straight out of school. But secondly, I felt surprisingly protective of universities when she said it.
Not because universities are perfect. God knows they aren’t. The appalling digital bureaucracy alone will finish me off one day. But because I think something really important happens to people when they properly study and study in community and in institutions full of passionate, curious, diverse humans and history dedicated to the integrity of that study. Particularly when they study subjects that teach them how to think rather than simply how to produce.
And I think we’re in danger of losing respect for that.
I first went to university when I was 19. I studied English Literature at the University of Exeter and absolutely fell in love with all things postcolonial literary theory. I loved suddenly realising there were entire ways of seeing the world that had never even occurred to me before.
Did it give me a neat vocational pathway into a high-paying career? No.
Did it teach me how to think? Absolutely.
And I genuinely think that matters.
I did my dissertation on Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and I remember being really struck by the title itself. This idea that no matter how carefully human beings build man-made structures around themselves, things invariably do fall apart eventually. Certainty falls apart. Identity falls apart. Cultures fall apart. Societies fall apart. Empires fall apart. Ego falls apart. Humans fall apart.
And if said humans are lucky, all the things that break us… grief, unfettered desire, love (especially the unrequited sort!) and really just life in general… teach them how to piece a deeper understanding of our world and themselves back together again.
Towards the end of my degree I remember having a conversation with one of my lecturers, Bob Lawson-Peebles, who was important to me during my time at Exeter.
I told him that I felt strangely unsettled leaving university because I’d arrived expecting to leave understanding the world far better than I did before, but instead I felt less certain about everything than when I’d started.
And I remember him smiling and saying that was exactly the point.
He said if somebody arrived at university completely certain of themselves and then left three years later even more convinced they knew everything, he’d be concerned they hadn’t really learned very much at all.
Because university isn’t there to make you all-knowing.
It’s there to make you realise how enormous the world actually is. How many perspectives there are. How much nuance exists. How much grey there is between the black and white certainties we cling to when we’re young and desperate to feel sure of ourselves.
I remember him saying that proper learning means becoming more comfortable with the reality that you don’t know everything and never will.
Not in a humiliating way.
In an intellectually honest way.
And I remember feeling this enormous sense of relief when he said that because I genuinely thought I’d somehow failed.
I thought the fact I felt less certain meant I’d become less intelligent.
But now, looking back nearly thirty years later, I think education at its best doesn’t close the mind. It opens it.
And perhaps that’s partly why I feel so uneasy about this growing disdain towards universities and academia, particularly in parts of the USA right now where arts and humanities subjects are increasingly mocked, defunded and treated as somehow indulgent or pointless.
Because education, at its best, is not about turning people into obedient little productivity machines.
And it’s not about creating smug intellectuals who think they’re morally superior either.
It’s about teaching people how to think.
How to question.
How to tolerate complexity.
How to sit in nuance instead of collapsing into certainty and tribalism every five minutes.
And maybe most importantly, it teaches you to become comfortable with the fact that no matter how intelligent you are, there will always be things you do not yet understand.
Which, if I’m honest, is maybe what humility actually is.
Anyway.
Fast forward nearly thirty years and here I am now, nearly 49, back at university again training to become a nurse.
Which is a VERY different experience from being a slightly pretentious English Literature student in the late 90s, let me tell you.
Firstly because I’m now doing a vocational degree with very real practical consequences attached to it. And secondly because I’ve arrived this time with decades more identity attached to who I think I am.
And, if I’m honest, probably quite a lot more ego too.
I absolutely love studying though.
I genuinely feel privileged to have this second chance at education. To use my brain in this way again. To sit in lectures and seminars and feel parts of myself waking back up intellectually.
I also feel incredibly grateful to the Scottish government for making education accessible in this way and to my brilliant tutors at the University of Dundee for creating a supportive, gender-and-age inclusive environment that genuinely welcomes people from different walks of life, including those of us arriving slightly later to the party.
Because going back to university at 47 as a single mother is not exactly relaxing.
Financially it has been really hard at times. I’m living on a tiny fraction of what I used to earn running my own business full-time. There are definitely days where I wonder what the hell I’m doing.
But I knew in my bones this was the right thing to do.
And there’s also something about physically being inside a university environment that feels very different from learning alone online or reading in isolation.
I’ve always been a learner. I read constantly. I’m studying random online courses and going to workshops pretty much everyday. I disappear down subject rabbit holes for fun. But university feels different somehow.
It feels… sacred almost. Like a collective space devoted to thought.
A place where people come together to exchange ideas and challenge each other and sharpen each other and occasionally completely undo each other’s certainty about things. And I think we underestimate how important that is.
Because some forms of learning can only really happen in relation to other people.
Which brings me to the commas.
Reader, I was appalled.
During the first few weeks of the course we had to do an academic English assessment thing to evaluate where we were academically and identify areas where we might need support.
And apparently one of the areas where I needed support was commas.
Now I need you to understand something very important here.
I considered myself EXCELLENT at grammar. I mean genuinely excellent. It was one of the few places in life where I didn’t question my ability.
I had an old-school primary school teacher called Miss Nightingale who drilled grammar into us with military precision. I had studied English Literature. I had written and spun words professionally for years. Grammar was absolutely part of my identity.
So when this (at first, seemingly innocuous) online assessment informed me I was using commas incorrectly, I reacted with the calm emotional maturity of a deeply evolved adult woman.
Meaning I completely lost my sh*t.
For several days I was absolutely furious.
Who were these upstarty buffoons to tell me how to use commas?
Do they KNOW who they’re talking to?
Honestly, I became embarrassingly irate about the whole thing. And the frustration permeated all areas of my life…
I lost sleep. I wrote a very long email to the head of Academic English explaining why I believed the marking was incorrect. I sought out and consulted various people who I hoped would validate my outrage. I wandered around muttering darkly about bureaucracy and declining standards and pining nostaligcally for ‘the good old days’.
It was all rather dramatic.
And the worst part is, eventually, very reluctantly, I had to concede that they were right.
Or rather, that language had evolved.
And even if I had once been technically correct in my comma usage, I no longer was according to current academic conventions.
I found this deeply, deeply annoying.
But underneath the annoyance was something much more uncomfortable.
My ego had been bruised.
Because it was never really about commas.
It was about identity.
I was attached to being “the grammatically correct one”. The articulate one. The educated one. The woman who knew how to write properly.
And suddenly I was back in a student seat being corrected by people younger than me.
That was the difficult pill to swallow.
Not the commas.
The humility.
Because yes, there absolutely are times when systems deserve questioning. Of course there are.
But there’s also a point where fighting reality simply becomes ego preservation.
And honestly, if I’d stormed off the course because I couldn’t tolerate being corrected over punctuation, what exactly would I have gained other than self-righteousness and a deeply embarrassing story?
What’s interesting is that nursing education places huge emphasis on reflection. We use reflective models to properly examine situations and understand not just what happened, but why we reacted the way we did.
And when I properly reflected on the comma incident, I realised how revealing it actually was.
I realised how quickly the ego wants to defend itself.
How attached we become to identities we’ve built around ourselves.
How easy it is to surround ourselves with people who will happily gallop alongside us on our high horse instead of gently encouraging us to climb down from it.
And I think that’s the thing I’m slowly learning.
Humility is not humiliation.
It’s openness.
It’s intellectual flexibility.
It’s being willing to remain teachable.
And here I am now at nearly 49, still absolutely astonished by how much I don’t know.
Of course I know more than I did at 19. Life itself teaches you things no textbook ever can. I have more perspective now. More emotional understanding. More compassion for human complexity.
But I’m still constantly surprised by life.
Shocked by it.
Awed by it.
Humbled by it.
And maybe that’s the point.
University never gave me all the answers.
But both of my university experiences have given (and continue to give) me ways of thinking, ways of seeing and ways of navigating complexity that continue to steady me when the world feels confusing or uncertain.
And for that, honestly, I’ll always be grateful.
Anyway. These are my first thoughts on humility.
I think I want to write another piece soon about community and collective learning and why I increasingly believe human beings are diminished in isolation and expanded in meaningful connection with one another.
But for now, I would like to formally apologise to every comma I have ever unwittingly misused.
We both deserved better.
