There’s something slightly rebellious about being a mature learner.
Not rebellious in the leather-jacket, loud-music sense. More in the “Yes, I do own seventeen highlighters and I’m not afraid to use them” kind of way.
This week I received my TMA 03 feedback — 89% for my blues choice. Eighty-nine percent! I read the score once, blinked, then read it again in case the screen was having a generous moment. It wasn’t. It was real. And for a brief, beautiful second, I allowed myself to sit in it.
For someone who never had the chance to get a degree the first time round, that 89% wasn’t just a number. It was proof. Proof that it’s never too late. Proof that lived experience counts. Proof that chaos can, occasionally, be colour-coded.
When Sadness Teaches Us
Life’s saddest moments have a strange duality.
They can crack us open and help us relate to others on a deeper, more human level — or they can make us want to pull the duvet over our heads and ignore the world entirely.
This week I celebrated my mum’s birthday. She passed away in 2023 after a battle with cancer. Ironically, she battled with alcohol for most of her life, yet cancer was the thing that finally took her.
Grief is complicated like that. It doesn’t arrive neatly packaged. It sits with you at the kitchen table. It whispers in quiet moments. It turns birthdays into reflections.
But here’s what I’ve learned: grief also sharpens empathy.
When you’ve lived through loss, you hear people differently. You notice the pauses in their sentences. You recognise the bravery it takes just to show up. Sadness, as heavy as it is, can deepen us — if we let it.
Care Homes, Classrooms and Finding My Voice
I spent much of my childhood in different care homes.
It’s not something I used to talk about. For a long time, it felt like something to hide. But experience has a way of reshaping itself over time. What once felt like instability has become determination.
Growing up without a consistent voice advocating for you makes you acutely aware of children who struggle to express themselves. The ones who sit quietly. The ones labelled “difficult.” The ones whose behaviour is louder than their words.
Those are the children I want to stand beside.
Becoming a SEN teacher isn’t just a career ambition for me. It’s personal. It’s a promise — to use my past to amplify someone else’s future.
Highlighters, Post-it Notes and Embracing the Chaos
Returning to education as an adult is humbling.
You sit at a desk thinking, How did I forget how referencing works?
You celebrate understanding a theory like you’ve just won a small Olympic medal.
You develop a slightly unhealthy attachment to stationery.
But there is something beautiful about choosing growth.
I never had the opportunity to get a degree when I was younger. Life was survival. Now, life is intention. I am determined to embrace the chaos — the schedules, the late nights, the essays fuelled by tea and stubbornness — as part one of my ambition to become a SEN teacher.
Mature learning isn’t about proving you were always capable.
It’s about proving you’re still willing.
Making Something Beautiful
I suppose what I’m really trying to say is this:
Take the challenges.
Take the grief.
Take the missed opportunities and the messy beginnings.
And use them.
Use them like snow settling on a spider’s web — fragile threads suddenly illuminated against a grey sky.
Use them like morning dew catching the light before the world fully wakes.
Pain does not have to be the end of the story. Sometimes it’s the ink.
This week I celebrated an 89%. I celebrated my mum. I celebrated the small, stubborn part of me that refuses to give up.
And maybe that’s what mature learning really is — not just academic growth, but the quiet decision to turn every hard chapter into something meaningful.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an essay to plan, three mugs of tea to drink, and at least four highlighters that urgently need to feel important.