It has been a while
Hi all,
It has been a while. Almost two years, to be exact.
Let me explain.
I arrived in London in 2024 with a new job, a new city, and no real sense of my footing. Then I was asked to help build a programme supporting jobseekers breaking into the green sector. Since that was originally what I wanted to do with this Substack, it felt like the work had found a better home. So the newsletter gathered dust, and I let it.
Then came 2025.
On paper, it is one of the best years of my life. I am excelling in my role, leading projects nominated for and winning multiple industry awards, and contributing meaningfully to climate education alongside my main work. I run my first marathon. I go on my first bikepacking trip. I am surrounded by people who inspire me to be a better version of myself, and I am more grateful for that than I know how to say.
At the same time, the world feels unbearably heavy.
I am watching genocide unfold in real time. Immigration hardens into a political weapon across the world. I tear my calf and lose running, the one thing that keeps me sane when everything else is too much. Work begins to feel uninspiring. Innovation is not encouraged despite past success, and the growth trajectory is unclear. I lose both my grandmothers. Family pressure resurfaces. Questions about my future grow louder, both from others and from myself.
So I start writing. Not to find answers, but to understand the questions I keep circling.
What does responsibility look like in a world this unequal. What do you owe the world when you have been given more than most. How do you keep ambition without burning out or becoming numb. What is our role in community. How do you work on climate when the systems causing harm are so deeply embedded.
By the end of the year, one thing becomes clear. Change is needed.
I hand in my notice and book a one-way ticket to Oman.
I arrive on January 1st, 2026, with no clear sense of what comes next. My friends call it a midlife crisis. Perhaps it is. It is also a privilege to be able to pause at all, and I am aware of that.
For years, I had made decisions by momentum. Study harder. Move countries. Take the role. Deliver the project. In Oman, I pause. I spend my days outdoors. I camp. I walk. I swim. I deliberately leave my two trusty portable chargers back in London, so I write instead.
Much of what I write is about hope.
I am aware that my ability to pause, reflect, and move across borders is a privilege many do not have. I am a Saudi woman who immigrated to the UK. Because of how I sound and present, I pass in rooms where other immigrants do not. I had the luxury of choosing to quit my job and sit with uncertainty rather than running from it. And I had the freedom to travel and live alone, something many women in my life, in my family, in my community, are not afforded due to expectation, pressure, and everything in between.
That awareness does not paralyse me. It sharpens my sense of responsibility.
Hope is not equally distributed. When you have access to it, you have a duty to turn it into action.
I frame that hope through a 2026 bingo card. Some squares are silly. Have a Sunday roast at a pub. Send a handwritten letter. Others are more serious. Land a meaningful job. Restart my Substack. I share it with my housemates. They share theirs back. It becomes a way of staying accountable to joy, not just productivity.
This newsletter is me ticking off that square.
So here is the rebrand.
Thinking about what comes next, I keep coming back to where I do my best work. It is not in the lab or the investment deck. It is in the difficult middle, where technically sound ideas meet the messiness of real implementation. Where the data exists but the operations are not set up to use it. Where the strategy is right but the people who have to deliver it were never in the room. Where the system makes sense on paper but falls apart in practice. That is where I find myself most alive, and it is what I want to explore here.
The climate gap is not technical. It is human.
That is what this Substack is now about. I will still share green job opportunities, that part of why many of you are here has not changed. But they will sit alongside honest writing about the work of working in climate. The complexity, the contradictions, the things that do not resolve neatly.
Which brings me to my two asks.
The first is to extend grace. To others, but also to yourself. I am hoping this becomes a communal learning experience, and there will be mistakes along the way. That is okay.
The second is to reply to this email. I gave you an update on my life and I genuinely want to hear yours. What are you working on? What questions are you circling? What would make this useful to you?
If this rebrand is not what you signed up for, I completely understand. But do send a message before you go. I mean it when I say I want to hear how you are.
That is all for now.
With love and care,
Rand