Believe it or not, I’m currently seriously considering resitting A-level psychology. I first attempted it fifteen years ago, aged eighteen. I was just out of special school and utterly unprepared for that type of academic thinking. Needless to say, I didn’t do well: the various different approaches confused me; I naively expected facts, and did not like how speculative and ambiguous the discipline was. I was lucky to scrape an E. The irony is, when I then went on to study sociology, I found it much easier, as psychology had prepared me. By then I could think in a much more scientific way.

In the last few days, I’ve been pondering going back to it. I’m pretty sure what once confused me would probably now fascinate me. Human behaviour has always intrigued me. Now I know a bit more of academia, and about how science functions as a discourse, I find myself yearning to go back. I know there’s no reason why I can’t pick up a few books and start teaching myself, but that E still hangs over me. It would be great to learn more about human behaviour, of course, but I also want to exorcise a bit of a failure in my past. I want to prove to myself that I do understand, and I can do it. Whether I’ll actually act on this idea remains to be seen; part of me worries that I’ll be just as confused as I was the first time. And then there’s the question of where – would a nearby college allow me to study it again? At the moment this is just an idea, but I think that studying psychology a bit more would hold a lot of benefits for me.