The Accidental Columnist: I wrapped my entire identity up in being nanny’s ‘little professor’

We’ve all got dead grandparents, right? I assume most people reading have at least one dead grandparent. Don’t try to tell me that you haven’t got any. You’re lying. You are. You know you are. That one grandparent is dead. Come on. Let go of the bit!

Alright – maybe you don’t have any dead grandparents. But I have three. And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one of them: Nanny Hayes.

Nanny Hayes was a marvellous Northsider and working-class woman. She could never admit when she was wrong and she could never walk to the shop without having at least one hour-long conversation with someone she half-knew.

She had this wonderful habit of throwing colloquialisms into every sentence. I can still hear her “Howaya chicken?” nearly a decade since we last spoke. One nickname she used for me was “little professor”. Specifically, I was “the family’s little professor.” The ‘smart one’.

In lots of ways, I liked being the smart one. It gave me a roadmap. I had to get the most As in my Junior Cert. I had to get the most points in my Leaving Cert. Once that was done, I had to get into a ‘smart person’ degree. Of course, then, I had to graduate with the best degree.

I followed most of these. I did get a lot of As in my Junior Cert; Nanny Hayes was delighted with that. I did get high points in my Leaving Cert and I did graduate from a ‘smart person’ degree. Nanny Hayes didn’t live long enough to see those, but I know she would have been proud.

Being the little professor was great for giving me that roadmap but it also gave me a weak identity. My entire worth was based on the idea of being the smart one and when I got to university and realised there were many smart ones, I had a hard time.

I remember once sitting in a therapist’s office when they posed an important question: “What if you failed at everything? What if you never got a good grade again? Don’t you think you’d still have value?”

At the time, my answer to that question was no. I could not see how I could be valuable if not successful at the same time. It’s something that I still struggle with from time to time.

When I finished my degree, I realised that chasing academic achievements purely for the success itself was never going to be fulfilling. There was never going to be this magical moment of ‘I’ve done it’.

In fact, I realised I found much more fulfilment in the things that mattered to me – LGBTQ+ activism, sexual health promotion, and helping to solve problems for students and people.

When I decided to opt out of the roadmap, to not go straight into a PhD programme and take some time to work in areas that I loved, I felt I had let Nanny Hayes down a bit. Becoming a real professor felt so far away.

What I’ve done better to understand now is that I was a little professor far before I knew much about anything. Being the little professor was not as much about being the smart one and more about being who I was – and I’ve definitely gotten better at that.

Who knows, I may eventually go back down the academic track. For now, I have moments that I catch myself delivering training or leading a project and I think how Nanny Hayes would think of her little professor all the same.

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