I am tucked up warm at my desk, a cardigan thrown over an optimistic spring wrap dress, socks with multicoloured spots on them warming my feet. Nina Simone is playing in the next room, there’s a small tumbler of red wine to my right. It’s a gloomy Sydney Sunday. The gloom is appropriate. I needed to hibernate and listen to Nina and write today.

My favourite teacher in high school told me I needed to learn to be louder. This week I watched him take the stand at an inquiry into child sexual abuse and use his voice to be loud, and open about what happened in his final years at my school.

It was a hard week; I read testimony after testimony of abuse, of cover up, of anger at inaction. My week was not so hard as it was for others; nevertheless my story is my story and I can only report from its perspective.

I used my voice to be louder to speak up for myself at work; to demand recognition where there was none, where it was deserved. By the week’s end I felt stronger, and tired, and ready to hide.

My sister texted early yesterday morning to ask if I had seen the news, just before I geared up and ducked under the grey surface of Sydney Harbour for a long overdue dive. I had not seen the news. I did not want to know about the news, for surely it was bad. And so I threw my phone in my bag and threw the bag in the car and locked the news away for a few hours as I swam around a silty, mostly silent cove, breathing, watching, pointing, smiling. It has been years between dives, yet I felt at peace and at home, breathing slowly to conserve air, becoming reacquainted with weightlessness, absorption, the secret life we don’t acknowledge.

It was an average dive. The visibility was one, two metres at best. The water was cold, and it was raining above. The fish were hiding and sparse. But we saw an octopus, flat and brown in the sand. We saw a little cuttlefish, fat and comic and backward moving. We saw a baby wobbegong, which made me homesick for Moreton Bay. My legs cramped on exit. I put my occy on my tank backwards. My nose hurt in my fifteen-year-old mask because it leaked saltwater. Michelle struggled with buoyancy — the shallow water and a new seven-millimetre thick wet suit did her no favours.

And it was wonderful. My work demands a constant interplay with the news and society and to absolutely escape those pressures for a morning made my heart happy.

And yet the surface, and the news, beckoned.

I read a series of facts from Facebook to my diving friends as we un-zippered from our suits, unbuckled our tanks, unfroze our feet. Attacks in Paris. 120 dead. No, 40 dead. No, 127 dead. A concert hall is under siege. Can you watch my gear — I need to go change. Seven simultaneous attacks. The borders have been closed. What the hell is going on?

We said goodbye and drove to the cinema at Bondi to escape some more into the latest James Bond flick. I ate a mountain of popcorn, drank a lake-sized serve of Coke.

And still, the news beckoned. I went home, lay in the bath, and read all I could.

Now, my phone is in another room. The predictable yes this is bad but this is worse arguments are raging on Facebook. Baghdad, Paris, my heart bleeds for blood shed in the name of religion. My heart bleeds for the sexual violence pitted against my classmates, hidden and dismissed by religion.

My heart bleeds today.

We are all battered and angry. The best I can do is speak up, be louder. And know what it is I need to do to protect myself and those I love from dangerous people and ideas, to find peace.

For we are all at war with hate, and inaction, and unacknowledged effort, and crime.