I write my own blog for a reason

I have been asked many times why I write my own blog. Why I don’t limit myself to academic papers, project reports, or policy briefs. Why I choose to write publicly, and in my own voice, about water and environmental challenges in Syria.

At first, I told myself it was because I had things to say about water, about the environment, about Syria, about a country whose rivers, lands, and people are too often reduced to numbers, headlines, or political shorthand. I write because technical reports alone cannot carry grief, memory, responsibility, or hope. They can explain scarcity, but not what it feels like to live inside it.

But that is not the full truth.

I also write because I am a person inside this work.

My relationship with environmental and water challenges in Syria is not abstract. It is not only professional. It is lived. It shaped where I come from, what I study, why I left, and why I continue to care so deeply. Writing only as a researcher would be incomplete, almost dishonest. Yes, data matters, models matter, policies matter, but so do the inner negotiations that happen when your work is entangled with your identity.

That is why I allow vulnerability into my writing.

Not to seek sympathy.
Not to turn research into confession.
And not because I believe my story is exceptional.

I do it because silence creates distance, and distance can flatten truth.

Adding self-reflection is my way of resisting that flattening. It is how I acknowledge uncertainty, fatigue, doubt, and growth alongside expertise. It is how I make space for complexity in a field that often rewards certainty and control. It is also how I remain accountable to myself: by naming what moves me, what scares me, and what keeps me going.

Is that over-sharing?

I don’t think so.

Over-sharing is when vulnerability replaces responsibility. When emotion is offered without reflection. When personal exposure becomes the point. That is not what I am doing here.

What I am sharing is context.

I believe there is strength in saying: this work affects me. There is honesty in admitting that research does not happen in a vacuum, especially when it concerns fragile environments, broken systems, and countries like Syria, where environmental collapse is never only environmental.

My blog is a space where rigor and humanity are allowed to coexist. Where analysis can sit next to reflection. Where water governance can be discussed alongside displacement, patience, frustration, and endurance.

I write to connect carefully and intentionally with others who understand that expertise does not require emotional absence. That caring deeply does not weaken credibility. That vulnerability, when handled with discipline, can sharpen insight rather than blur it.

This blog is not everything I am.
But it is an honest part of me.

And that, I believe, is worth sharing.