The Venn diagram that maybe isn't

After this morning's joint supervision, I have three categories in my head:

• The story I want to weave for my examiners (ie what goes in the thesis)
• The things I want to write about academically
• Ideas I want to discuss with people* and ideas I want to tell people*

*people = a set of people in the policy world; a set of people in the inclusive research/disability studies/coproduced research world; my long-suffering Barod colleagues

In an ideal world, I can't help feeling that the three should overlap to form one perfect circle, possibly with artistically blurred edges as there are no beautifully neat all-sewn-up stories in the social world - or at least not ones that stand the test of exposure to everyday life.

In my anxious world, I fear that I have three things that do not overlap at all - and, worse, that I have no clarity about what is encompassed by any of these categories. It feels less like 'going down the rabbit hole' and more like 'rabbit caught in the headlights'.

If I think of these categories as distinct but overlapping, I have a Venn diagram.

If I think of them as appearing visually distinct but forming a single entity, I have something closer to an amoeba. 

And herein lies my problem.

Like the 'arms' (pseudopodia) of an amoeba, the three categories won't keep still! Ideas flow within the amoeba creating movement and changing which category any particular thought might be assigned. And any attempt to subdivide an amoeba into its constituent parts are doomed to failure as it is a single-celled organism. 

So...

Time to stick the amoeba under the microscope and take a photo. And then stick the photo at the front of my thesis, along with a photo that magnifies the part of the amoeba that I want to describe and write about within the thesis. 

Or maybe there is another analogy that will carry the weight of the challenge better. I do like the idea of storytelling, and it feels a bit as if I am grappling with constructing a Silmarillion when The Hobbit will do quite fine by itself. J R Tolkien needed to see his mythical world to be able to write his story, but the reader can make sense of The Hobbit without needing to have pre-read the Simarillion. 

And perhaps that is what has happened. Before I could settle to write the story for my examiners, I needed to have a clear picture of my own version of the mythical world I call 'the social world'. 

I have got to stop circling and perfecting my mythical world to my satisfaction and get writing - or at least drawing. Whether it's a Venn diagram, amoeba or mythical world, I need to stop poking around trying to label it and START PRODUCING