We are just about two weeks from the last month of the year and I don’t know how we came to be here so quickly, so without resolution and so completely surrounded by weariness.

It has been a long year.

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I do not remember if I brought disillusionment with me into 2012 or if it’s something I’ve picked up as we stumbled through the year.

My recollections of the past ten months are tinged with bitterness, some triumph; but mostly, with incomprehension.

January was a whole other country, a whole other person.

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I know we’re all tired at this time of the year. I know it gets harder and harder to find a bit of magic in the every day when misery, heartache and wretchedness confronts you at every corner.

This weekend, I swore to myself, would be work-free. I would spend it watching tennis, films; have a Homeland marathon; read. I was house/dog sitting for a friend- I could pretend to be on holiday already; not just a six minute stroll from my own bed.

The doorbell rang this morning and an emaciated man begged me to let him work on the lawn so he could afford to eat.

It gets harder and harder to say no, to steel yourself to empathy; to despair.

I ploughed through my work to-do list this afternoon.

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It has been a year of heartbreak.

Friends have lost homes, families, parents, lives and every day there is a knot of dread that refuses to unclench at what else will break today, where else the tears are shed and for whom the bells will toll.

There is violence everywhere I look.

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I speak of human rights and bodily integrities and autonomies and throw around terms of legalese, aid-speak garble that is supposedly important to how our health systems work, the world’s priorities, and, bottom line, whether women and young people die or whether they live.

I speak and challenge and debate and question and advocate and write and critique and fly across the world, and when it comes down to it- I cross my fingers and hope and plead and hope and plead that somehow, someone, somewhere will just give a shite about all the numbers and statistics and arguments that is laid out in front of them.

But when reality goes beyond a piece a paper, we sit down in community spaces and fill it up with words and figures and facts and graphs and people tell us to ‘speak their language’ because we are incomprehensible. Un-understandable. It pierces me with half parts irony and half parts hysteria because the words and figure and facts and graphs are nothing but what people live every single day.

And we say ‘everyday realities’ and nobody knows what we’re saying. Because we never ask ‘whose everyday realities?’, never step back and question ‘what does that even mean?’. Because if we were to, we would have to question everything. In the end, when we say ‘everyday realities’ we mean the lives of others.

November is a filled with words. And I read them, jaded.

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On Friday, I tweeted: ‘Alternate career choices. Go.’

Friends told me (half jokingly, I’m sure) to teach English, teach Dev/Aid related things at University, bake, become a midwife {definitely a joke}. And I marvelled at all the things people think {however facetiously} I could be- things I once thought I could do.

It would be better for my sanity, my health, my social life and my sense of self to be a professional dog-walker, book recommender, speech writer, a chef at an intimate invite-only restaurant- anything but this faith-destroying work that takes everything I believe in and crushes it every single day and flings it right back at me; mocking me to pick it up, pick it up and come back for more in the next few hours because none of this sleeps, none of it ever takes a break, and the joke’s on you if you ever thought you could.

It would be better. I would be happier.

But, I’m not sure how far I can run without wanting and wishing and waiting to be yanked right back into it all.

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It is almost December and I cannot remember much of January.

Only that I believed. And I would be miserable if I were not here.

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