The Trio & Me

23. Study a course

When I first wrote study a course on my 40 Things Before 40 list, I genuinely thought I would find some little 12-week course that sparked my interest. Maybe something creative, something practical, or something completely random that I had always wanted to learn. I imagined it being one of the easier things on the list — enrol, learn something new, get a certificate at the end and put a nice big tick beside it. I certainly didn’t imagine that those three little words would somehow turn into me enrolling in an entire Bachelor of Psychology (Honours).

But as I started looking at courses, I kept coming back to the same thing. I didn’t just want to learn something for the sake of learning it. I wanted to choose something that meant something to me. Something that could help me, and maybe eventually help other people too. The more I searched, the more psychology kept appearing, and the more I thought about it, the more obvious it became why. A huge part of my 40 Things Before 40 list has been about healing. It has been about challenging myself, learning who I am, doing things alone, becoming comfortable in my own skin and figuring out what my life looks like when I’m not simply surviving it. Psychology somehow felt like another piece of that.

I wanted to understand my brain. Not just in the emotional, therapeutic sense of understanding myself, but actually understand what was happening inside it. I wanted to understand trauma and memory, behaviour and emotions, triggers and responses. I wanted to understand why sometimes I could be completely rational and grounded, and other times the smallest thing could make my entire nervous system behave as though something terrible was happening again. I wanted to know why I responded to certain situations the way I did. Why I could lose myself in the smallest of triggers. Why my body could react before my logical brain had even worked out what was wrong.

I live every day with trauma ingrained into parts of me. Having complex PTSD means that sometimes my reactions don’t make sense until I stop and trace them backwards. Some days are incredibly hard and others are an absolute breeze. Some days I can be triggered by a smell, by walking past a particular item in the supermarket, by the expression on a stranger’s face, a tone of voice, a sound, or something so ordinary that another person wouldn’t even notice it. Something can transport my nervous system somewhere my conscious mind wasn’t planning on going. Then, on another day, I can talk openly about trauma, hear incredibly difficult stories, reflect on things that have happened in my own life and be completely okay. That contradiction fascinated me. How could my brain cope with something enormous one day, yet be completely overwhelmed by something seemingly insignificant the next?

Therapy has helped me understand so much of myself, and healing has already changed the way I experience my life, but I found myself wanting to go deeper. I wanted to know the science behind what I was experiencing. I wanted to understand what trauma actually does to us, why memories can carry so much power, why our bodies can remember things our conscious minds aren’t actively thinking about, and why humans develop the coping mechanisms that we do. I didn’t want to look at myself as a collection of reactions that needed to be fixed. I wanted to understand how those reactions came to exist in the first place.

I kept asking myself whether I could truly understand my own healing if I didn’t understand my brain. Maybe I didn’t need to understand all of it to heal, but I wanted to. I have spent so much of my life asking why? Why did these things happen? Why did people behave the way they did? Why did I tolerate certain things? Why did I respond in particular ways? Why did I become fiercely independent in some areas of my life and incredibly vulnerable in others? Eventually, some of those questions shifted from why did this happen to me? to what did all of this teach my brain to do in order to survive? That was a much more interesting question.

So, because apparently I don’t do anything by halves, instead of enrolling in a short course, I applied for a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours).

It sounded slightly ridiculous even to me. I had written study a course, not commit yourself to years of university. A psychology degree isn’t something I can neatly complete before I turn 40. It isn’t a quick qualification that I can frame, photograph and tick off the list. It is years of study. And the more I learn, the more I realise how much there is still to learn. There is every possibility that I’ll still be studying the human brain in some capacity in 10 years, 20 years, or on my deathbed — and strangely, I love that idea. I don’t want to reach an age where I decide I know enough. I want to keep questioning things, challenging what I think I know and discovering new ways of understanding people and myself.

So I applied. And I was accepted.

Then came the slightly inconvenient realisation that I actually had to do the degree.

I took on a full-time study load while continuing to work full-time. I remained a mum to three children who still needed me regardless of whether I had an assignment due at midnight. I continued doing everything that comes with my career and the responsibility I carry there. I still made time for my kids, my friends and the people I love. I still went out. I still laughed. I still had adventures. I still took myself away alone. I still worked through therapy and healing. I still kept working my way through this 40 Things list. Life didn’t stop so that I could study psychology; psychology had to somehow squeeze itself into the life I already had.

And there were definitely moments where I questioned my life choices.

There were ridiculously late nights staring at a laptop when every sensible part of me knew I should have been asleep. There were weekends swallowed by assignments and journal articles. There were moments when I would finish a full day at work, come home and do all the things that needed to be done as a mum, and then open my laptop knowing that my day wasn’t even close to finished. There was an irresponsible amount of coffee involved. There were times when I was exhausted, frustrated and wondering why I hadn’t just chosen a nice little scrapbooking course like a normal almost middle aged women.

But there were also moments where I would sit in front of something I was learning and think, Oh. That makes sense.

Not necessarily because a textbook was explaining my life to me, but because I was beginning to understand human behaviour differently. I was learning how complicated we are. I was learning that our brains are extraordinary, messy, adaptive things. I was learning about development, perception, cognition, behaviour, counselling, culture and the countless factors that shape the way people experience the world. I started noticing things differently. I started asking better questions. I became more aware of how much we can never know about another person’s experience simply by looking at their behaviour from the outside.

And somewhere amongst all of that learning, I was also proving something to myself. I worked ridiculously hard.

I didn’t just want to pass. I wanted to know that I had given it everything I could. I studied when I was tired. I researched until things made sense. I rewrote things when they weren’t good enough. I pushed myself academically in a way I hadn’t done for a very long time. I had moments of doubt and moments where I wondered whether I had taken on too much, but I kept going.

And the results came back.

Three High Distinctions. Full marks across the three courses I enrolled in.

I stared at some of those results in complete disbelief, because while I knew how much work I had put into them, there was still a part of me that wasn’t expecting to do that well. And I am so incredibly proud of myself. Not in an embarrassed, minimise-it-so-I-don’t-sound-too-proud kind of way. I am genuinely, unapologetically proud of myself.

Because those grades aren’t just numbers on a university transcript to me. They represent nights when I could have decided I was too tired. They represent juggling motherhood, full-time work, study, healing and an actual life. They represent choosing to challenge myself at 39 when it would have been much easier to tell myself that university belonged to a different stage of my life. They represent discovering that my capacity to learn didn’t disappear because I got older, became a mother, built a career or accumulated responsibilities.

More importantly, this wasn’t about proving that I was smart enough to study psychology. Somewhere along the way, it became about giving myself permission to remain curious about who I am.

For so much of my life, my energy went into surviving what was happening around me. Then it went into building stability. Then raising children, building a career, keeping everyone safe, being responsible, being dependable and being the person who could handle things. Turning 40 has made me think differently about what I want the next part of my life to contain. I don’t only want to survive things or accomplish things. I want to understand. I want to keep growing. I want to keep learning simply because there is an entire world of things I don’t know yet.

Maybe one day this degree will lead somewhere completely different professionally. Maybe I’ll continue working in spaces where understanding trauma, development and human behaviour allows me to advocate more strongly for children and families. Maybe I’ll keep studying far beyond the degree. Maybe parts of what I learn will simply make me a better mother, leader, friend and human being. I don’t actually know where it ends yet, and for once, I don’t think I need to.

What I do know is that I started this because I wanted to understand myself more deeply, and already it has given me so much more than I expected.

There is something incredibly empowering about taking the things that once made me ask, What is wrong with me? and replacing that question with curiosity. What happened here? What did my brain learn? What purpose did that response once serve? What does the research tell us? And what can I do with that knowledge now?

Maybe that’s another part of healing too.

Not erasing what happened. Not pretending the triggers don’t exist. Not reaching some imaginary finish line where nothing ever hurts again. But slowly understanding yourself well enough that your reactions no longer feel like a mystery. Understanding that the brain that sometimes frustrates me is also the same brain that found ways to survive, adapt, learn, parent, lead, love, study and keep moving forward.

When I wrote study a course on this list, I thought I was giving myself a little challenge. Instead, I accidentally gave myself the beginning of something that could stay with me for the rest of my life.

I haven’t finished my psychology degree, so technically this one doesn’t have the same neat ending as some of the other things on my list. I can’t say done, never have to do that again. In fact, I’ve really only just started.

But I did what I wrote on the list. I studied a course. Actually, I studied several of them.

I worked full-time, studied full-time, raised my children, continued living my life and somehow came out the other side with three High Distinctions and results that I am ridiculously proud of.

At 39, I decided that understanding myself was worth studying for. At 40, I’ll still be learning. And hopefully at 50, 60, 70 and beyond, I’ll still be learning too.

Because perhaps this one was never really about completing a course. Maybe it was about proving to myself that there is no age where we have to stop becoming someone new.

I may have slightly misunderstood the assignment. But I’m really bloody proud that I did. 3 courses down – 29 to go! 😅

🤍 K