A lot of people make duff position calls, unfortunately. Sometimes deliberately.
The other side of this debate is that there is nothing wrong with joining straight in if there isn't other traffic, but certain A/G controllers don't like this (especially at certain airfields where the A/G is done by the school CFI
) and try to push everybody into doing an overhead join, which is a complete waste of time.
I would ask for a traffic report and if he is not aware of traffic I would go straight in - keeping a lookout of course as one does anyway.
To many traditionally trained pilots, a straight in join is more difficult that flying a circuit to land, but anybody navigating using radio nav can position themselves correctly 3 nm out (often, at that point, without sight of the runway) and then descend onto the runway.
One tip, Gemma, is that if something has shaken you, fly away somewhere for 10 mins or whatever, calm down, then come back. Flight training is all about piling on the pressure (to the point where the student often cracks and the instructor has to take over) but you would never do that by choice when flying alone.