Policy and procrastination

Seems another large 'gap' has appeared between postings. I truly am flaky.

My meeting has just been cancelled, normally I would do something productively student facing. But today, I feel a little off kilter, like my internal gyroscope is rotating out of sync. So I have just been using that time by reading, 'Stalking Ableism: Using Disability to Expose 'Abled' Narcissism by Fiona Kumari Campbell. Usually at this point, I would jot down some thoughts. I have piles of these, scattered like a gust of withered leaves in autumn. My hope is that like the detritus of decomposing leaves, the seemingly useless, will eventually create food and growth. I acknowledge that this is essential. I know this as fact. Yet, I don't actually seem to believe that at the moment. Like a failed Catholic, I know the mantra, mouth the word of the prayers, but that core of faith is a vast and empty space.

On Friday, I will attend confession, and will submit to the Hail Marys that my lovely supervisor gives. She will feed me the sermon, the one I regularly preach to students, about the phases of learning, about the need to read, read and read some more, about the need to get stuff on paper. The need to create a plan, to write to this plan, to give the scattered thoughts shape and form...she will explain how research is filled, blighted even, by these pot-holes. That along the journey we stumble, or we meander off course, and that at times returning to the discarded leaves is essential. And I will nod and agree, and knuckle down. I will rewrite the shoddy mess that occurred last week, and I will turn that narrative meander through a pile of mismatched leaves into some coherent thought. I know this, I don't believe it, but I know it.

But today, reading Campbell's article again, I almost realised why I have this feeling of 'stuckness'. The decomposition has almost formed into an elusive, and frail skeleton of thought.

I am writing about 'policy'. Interesting you all cry! Yet, not matter how I recount these historical, and sometimes contemporary events, it never seems quite right, it stays narrative. It feels like a compression, as if I am squeezing chunks through a tin can squasher. There is too much to say, and so I try and rush, and squash and squeeze...yet I feel no interest in expanding. I know there are uncited chunks (horror, shock, gasp). I know I have omitted , I know I have made vast, gloriously sweeping statements. I know I have made points, not arguments. I have laboured this for the last two months, and all I have produced is 5,500 badly written words. If it was an undergraduate assignment, I would be struggling to scrape a pass. And if you asked me about these policies, I could tell you precisely nothing.

Who knows, by Friday, it may even have turned into words.


Maybe by Friday it will have digested into something actually worth saying?