Balancing Idealism and Reality: My UN Experience
I used to believe in the United Nations. Not in a naive, starry-eyed way, but in the way a doctor believes in the value of treating the wounded, even when the tools are blunt. I believed it was better to be inside the machine than criticising it from afar. I told myself that if people of integrity left, only the worst would remain. And so I stayed. For over a decade. Ten and a half years of my life.
I joined the UN not out of ambition but inheritance. My brother, Seb is a Naval Surgeon and volunteered with the UN for fifteen years. His courage and quiet sense of duty left a mark on me. He never made a fuss, but he went where it mattered. When he stepped back, I stepped forward. It felt right. A continuation of something honourable. A mantle passed between siblings.
In those early years, I believed in internationalism. I believed that global cooperation mattered. That it was possible to bring order and dignity to chaos. That even the most compromised institution could still be a force for good if the people inside it tried hard enough. And so I tried.
I worked in war zones. I sat in freezing temporary offices. I drafted health strategy whilst hiding behind sandbags. I bore witness to malnutrition, trauma, and death. I argued for more food, more vaccines, more truth. I did my job well. And I did it with the conviction that the system I was serving, while flawed, was still on the side of the vulnerable.
But disillusionment is rarely dramatic. It arrives quietly. A memo that asks us not to name names. A silence in the room when evidence is inconvenient. A colleague sidelined for telling the truth. The official story that bears no resemblance to the reality we live.
By the end of 2018, something shifted in me. There were specific moments. A decision whitewashed. A report doctored. A meeting where silence was the only safe thing to say. I will explore these later. But what I knew, by early 2019, was that I could no longer stay.
I left before the pandemic. I watched what followed from a distance, no longer wearing the badge, no longer reciting the mission. And yet, part of me had hoped the UN might still rise to the occasion. But what the pandemic revealed, and confirmed, is that the institution I gave my best years to is not neutral. It is not scientific. It is not, in any consistent way, good.
This essay is not written in anger, though there is anger beneath it. It is written in sorrow. Because to believe in something and then see it for what it is, to work inside something broken and realise that your effort will not fix it, is a kind of grief.
And grief, like truth, demands acknowledgement.
I no longer believe in the United Nations. And I am no longer ashamed to say it.
By the time COVID-19 swept across the globe, I had already left. I was no longer sitting in emergency briefings or drafting field response strategies. I no longer wore the blue badge or answered to the acronyms. But I watched. Closely. Not with bitterness, but with the eyes of someone who had once believed. And what I saw confirmed what I had already begun to suspect. The institution I had given more than a decade to was not simply flawed. It was failing.
In those early days, the world needed clarity. It needed steady leadership and a firm commitment to scientific truth. What it received instead was hesitation, contradiction, and deferral to political pressure. The World Health Organisation, the UN’s flagship health body, initially praised China’s “transparency” in a statement dated 30 January 2020, whilst downplaying early warnings from Taiwan and independent researchers about human-to-human transmission. By the time the global alarm was sounded, it was too late. Millions were already exposed.
What made it harder to accept was the irony. For decades, the WHO had warned the world that a pandemic was inevitable. From SARS to H1N1 to Ebola, reports had repeatedly stressed that global preparedness was dangerously inadequate. Conferences were held. Funding frameworks were drafted. Contingency plans were rehearsed. The rhetoric was resolute. When—not if—a pandemic arrived, the UN would be ready.
But when the pandemic came, they sat on their hands. The WHO hesitated, afraid of offending member states. Afraid of causing panic. Afraid of being wrong. In that paralysis, the virus spread.
Of course, the WHO was not acting alone. It was operating within a system that prized diplomacy over disclosure, consensus over speed. And that is precisely the problem. At a time when bold decisions were needed, the UN’s instinct was to hedge. To wait. To smooth over tension rather than confront it. The cost was counted in lives.
Even as the months wore on, the messaging remained muddled. Public statements were made that contradicted earlier guidance. Face masks were first discouraged, then encouraged. Asymptomatic transmission was first considered rare, then common. Travel bans were first condemned, then quietly adopted. The problem wasn’t just the science evolving, as defenders often claimed. It was the failure to be honest about uncertainty, and the refusal to admit when mistakes had been made.
Perhaps most concerning of all was the silencing of dissent. Scientists and doctors who questioned prevailing guidance, even when their critiques were well-founded, were labelled problematic. Within the UN system, this is not new. I had seen it many times before. Professionals with expertise were overruled by political appointees. Evidence-based decisions were massaged to fit a predetermined narrative. Reports were softened. Numbers were rounded. The image always mattered more than the outcome.
COVID simply laid it bare.
Behind the scenes, many staff I once worked with were demoralised. I received messages from former colleagues who admitted they no longer trusted the guidance they were disseminating. They described endless Zoom meetings filled with jargon and contradiction. They spoke of mounting pressure to “keep the messaging clean,” even when the reality was anything but. Some left. Most stayed silent.
To be clear, I don’t believe that the UN deliberately sought to cause harm. But harm occurred anyway. The delay in declaring a pandemic. The lack of coordination with national health systems. The vague and often contradictory public communications. The preference for diplomacy over data. The result was confusion, polarisation, and eroded public trust — not just in the UN, but in science itself.
In the years since, some have tried to rehabilitate the UN’s pandemic response. Reports have been written. Strategic frameworks have been proposed. Lessons have been “learnt.” But the underlying problem remains. An institution that cannot name the political pressures it is beholden to cannot be trusted to act impartially. A system that punishes truth-telling in private will always struggle to lead in public.
I think of the young idealists who joined in 2020, believing they were stepping into an organisation guided by science and solidarity. I think of the disillusionment they must now feel, much sooner than I did. And I wonder how many of them will keep quiet, hoping to change the system from within, the way I once did. How many will grow older, more cautious, more afraid. How many will leave, quietly, without ever saying what they saw.
COVID did not break the UN. It revealed it. The gaps that opened in 2020 had been forming for years. The pandemic simply showed the world what some of us had already come to know — that the mask of competence had long since slipped.
Long before the pandemic, I had seen science pushed to the side. Not overtly, not in ways that would ever show up on paper. But in the meetings behind the meetings, in the redrafting of reports, in the subtle ways facts were softened to protect reputations. The UN has always presented itself as an institution rooted in evidence. But inside, evidence was only as useful as it was convenient.
In theory, our work was data-driven. We collected field reports, commissioned studies, and ran needs assessments. We were told to follow the science. But when the numbers reflected something politically difficult, they were quietly revised. Not falsified outright, just blurred. I remember one situation where malnutrition rates in a conflict zone were above the emergency threshold. The report used different indicators to keep it below. Another time, vaccine hesitancy data in a fragile state was stripped of context so it would not upset national authorities. The priority was always to maintain access, not accuracy.
That culture ran deep. Scientific integrity was not protected; it was negotiated. I remember a colleague, a brilliant epidemiologist, being reprimanded for publishing data in a peer-reviewed journal without first clearing it through regional headquarters. The data was accurate. The methodology sound. But the conclusions did not align with the prevailing narrative. He was labelled uncooperative. His contract was not renewed.
The UN system rewards obedience, not rigour. When faced with political pressure, truth becomes malleable. I saw this during Ebola. A senior health advisor flagged discrepancies in case reporting. The numbers being shared with donors were inflated. Rather than investigate, he was told to “let it go” because the funding environment was delicate. He left not long after. It was understood, without anyone saying it outright, that raising the alarm would make you a liability.
Science cannot survive in an environment like that. At best, it becomes selective. At worst, it becomes performative. The façade of evidence remains, but the integrity behind it erodes.
COVID only made this visible to the wider world. The early reluctance to investigate the virus’s origins, the deference to official state narratives, the refusal to entertain uncomfortable hypotheses — all of it was familiar. I had seen that pattern before. The instinct to avoid blame. To protect relationships. To maintain the illusion of control. The WHO’s refusal to press harder on the origins of the virus was not surprising. It was entirely in keeping with the culture I had known.
There is a difference between diplomacy and deceit. Diplomacy recognises complexity and seeks cooperation. Deceit pretends complexity does not exist so as not to offend. The UN too often chooses the latter. It is easier to speak in platitudes than to admit the limits of knowledge. Easier to present consensus than to expose disagreement. Easier to deliver a carefully worded press release than to face the messy, uncomfortable truth.
What is lost in all this is trust. Trust from the public. Trust from the people doing the work. Trust from those of us who once believed. Science relies on transparency. When it is hidden behind politics, its authority collapses. Not because the science itself is wrong, but because the institutions that claim to defend it no longer inspire belief.
Some would argue that politics is unavoidable in any global system. That compromise is necessary to operate at scale. But there is a difference between compromise and corruption. Between working within constraints and abandoning your own principles. The UN has crossed that line too many times.
When I left, I did not leave because I stopped caring. I left because I cared too much. Watching good people silenced, data distorted, and truth diluted for the sake of diplomatic ease was no longer something I could participate in. The betrayal of science is not abstract. It has consequences. Delayed responses. Misdirected aid. Lives lost.
In the end, I did not want to be part of an institution that claimed to uphold evidence while routinely undermining it. The truth deserved better. And so did the people who trusted us to speak it.
I remember the moment it began to feel personal. Not just frustrating or hypocritical, but something closer to betrayal. It was during a policy briefing in late 2018, one of those routine sessions where senior staff report on violations of international law. The speaker, a lawyer from another agency, spoke with real passion about the abuses occurring in one conflict zone, rightly condemning the targeting of civilians. Then, without even pausing, he skipped over another region entirely. Not one mention. Not a single slide. When I asked why, he gave me a look. Not irritated. Not confused. Just tired. “It’s too complicated,” he said. “We’ve agreed not to focus on that right now.”
That conflict was Israel and Gaza.
Inside the UN, there is an unspoken rule. Some suffering counts more than others. Some victims are worthy of advocacy. Others are best left unnamed. This is not about failing to criticise Israel. Criticism of Israel is routine, sometimes warranted, often not. What is missing is balance. Context. Consistency. The same standards that are rightly applied elsewhere seem to dissolve when it comes to the Jewish state.
Over time, the rhetoric became harder to ignore. Resolutions passed in the General Assembly singled out Israel again and again, often with language that bordered on inflammatory. Meanwhile, regimes with appalling human rights records were treated with deference. Nations where women were jailed for removing a headscarf. Nations where journalists vanished. Nations that openly persecuted minorities. These were met with caution. With “ongoing dialogue.” With silence.
This double standard is not subtle. In 2023, the UN General Assembly passed fifteen resolutions condemning Israel, but only seven condemning all other countries combined. North Korea received one. Iran, one. Russia, two. Syria, one. China, none. The disproportion is staggering. And it is not new.
I have worked in regions where war crimes were ongoing and ignored. Where rape was used as a weapon and dismissed. Where starvation was a tool of control and went unmentioned. Yet the outrage always returned to Israel. It became clear that Israel’s existence itself was treated by some within the system as a provocation.
Anti-Semitism in the UN is rarely explicit. But it does not have to be. It lives in what is left unsaid. In the casual comparisons. In the unchallenged slurs. In the consistent failure to apply the same human rights framework to all peoples. It lives in the way Jewish staff are sometimes treated with suspicion, as though their nationality or faith renders them compromised. I watched colleagues, deeply professional and fair-minded, pushed out of decision-making roles simply because they were Israeli, or were perceived as “too sympathetic.”
The real heartbreak is not just the hypocrisy. It is the betrayal of the values we were taught to uphold. Human dignity. Equality. Integrity. These words are printed in every report, quoted in every speech. But they lose meaning when selectively applied.
I could no longer reconcile the gap between the UN’s stated mission and its behaviour. When Yazidi women were enslaved, we were told to proceed carefully. When Palestinians were harmed, we were told to speak loudly. When Uighurs were imprisoned, we were told to wait for consensus. When Israelis were stabbed, we were told it was a complicated situation.
There is nothing complicated about stabbing a teenager on a bus.
The selective moral outrage was not just frustrating. It became untenable. In the eyes of many within the system, the Jewish state was not a nation among others. It was a problem to be managed. And in failing to hold itself to its own standards, the UN revealed something much darker than incompetence. It revealed that it had abandoned moral clarity for moral theatre.
I don’t claim that Israel is beyond criticism. No country is. But when one state is held to an impossible standard, and others are excused entirely, the issue is no longer policy. It is prejudice.
Some will say that speaking this way makes me politically biased. Others will accuse me of being disloyal. But I believe the opposite is true. Loyalty to principle requires the courage to call out hypocrisy, even within the institutions we once trusted. I stayed silent for too long. I nodded in rooms where I should have spoken. I thought I could work around it. That quiet integrity was enough. But it was not.
By the end of 2018, I knew I could no longer serve an institution that performed righteousness whilst abandoning truth. The UN was not simply flawed. It had lost its moral anchor.
And once you see that, you cannot unsee it.
People often ask why I stayed as long as I did. If I saw what I now describe, if the signs were there, if the system was broken, why give it more than a decade of my life?
The answer is complicated, because I am.
I stayed because I believed in the mission. Not the slogans, but the substance. The idea that international cooperation could prevent war, feed the hungry, protect the innocent. I believed that imperfect institutions could still serve noble aims, that people like me, serious, capable, idealistic, could steer things quietly in the right direction. I was wrong, but not foolish. Hope and hubris are difficult to disentangle.
I also stayed because of my brother. Seb served with integrity and dignity in some of the worst places on earth. He never spoke of what he saw, but I knew. When he left, I stepped forward, feeling the pull of something larger than either of us. He had done his time. Now it was my turn. It felt like continuity. It felt like family.
There was also something more selfish. I was good at the work. I was calm in crisis, persuasive in policy rooms, tireless in the field. The work gave shape to my days. It gave meaning to my sacrifices. I could justify the long hours, the missed birthdays, the constant travel, because I told myself it mattered. It meant something to be needed. To be effective. To be part of something with scope and scale.
One of the areas I worked on towards the end of my time there was nuclear disarmament policy. It was, ironically, one of the few policy spaces where I felt the tension between idealism and pragmatism was actually acknowledged. There were strong voices pushing for a total ban. The kind of disarmament that sounded noble on paper but made no sense in the real world. I disagreed, not because I didn't want peace, but because I had lived through the evidence of what happens when power is left unbalanced.
Deterrence is not romantic. It is not meant to be. It is a doctrine born out of horror. But it has held, in large part, because it reminds powerful nations that they are not invincible. The logic of mutually assured destruction is brutal, but it has arguably kept more peace than any humanitarian initiative. The memory of two world wars taught us something. The risk now is that we forget.
I found myself in policy meetings where the conversation leaned towards disarmament without any real plan for enforcement or symmetry. I argued that unless every nuclear power disarmed at once, which was never going to happen, unilateral disarmament by even one nation was not a show of courage but a display of vulnerability. And vulnerability, on the international stage, invites risk.
I remember the discomfort in the room when I said it. That is when I realised many in the UN did not want uncomfortable truths. They wanted consensus. I was not there to cause trouble. But I was also not there to rubber stamp something I did not believe in.
Similarly, I became vocal about nuclear energy, another subject that divided the room. As someone deeply committed to environmental protection, I understood the impulse to reject anything with the word nuclear in it. But the numbers don’t lie. If we are serious about phasing out coal and oil, if we want to provide clean, reliable energy at scale, then nuclear is one of the few realistic options we have. It isn’t perfect, but it is far better than pretending solar alone will save us.
The science was there. The case was strong. But again, ideology won. Policy briefs were altered to downplay support. Some member states insisted on language that left nuclear energy out altogether. Not because it was unsafe, but because it was politically inconvenient.
By this point, I was tired. Not just from the work, but from the mental contortions it took to keep justifying an institution that was so clearly afraid of its own integrity. I had started to lie to myself. To say it was not so bad. That all institutions are compromised. That the work still mattered. But that is how rot spreads. Not with wickedness, but with weariness. With the quiet erosion of standards.
What finally broke me was not a grand moment. It was small. A decision not to intervene. A report edited without my consent. A sense that even the colleagues I respected had stopped fighting. We were all tired. And tired people make peace with the unacceptable.
When I left, I did not rage. I packed my things and went home. I called Seb. I made tea. I cried. And then I began the slow work of rebuilding myself.
I don’t regret the years I gave. I do regret not leaving sooner. But I understand why I stayed. I stayed because I believed that good people on the inside could still make a difference. I stayed because I thought integrity could survive diplomacy. I stayed because I hoped. And hope is hard to let go of.
Disillusionment is not the end of belief. It is a bruising evolution. You stop expecting the world to match your ideals. You stop waiting for the cavalry. But you don’t stop caring. You simply become more careful about where you place your faith.
After I left the UN, there was a strange silence. Not just in my schedule, but in my mind. I had lived in motion for so long, with back-to-back assignments, high-stakes meetings, and the constant low hum of urgency. Stepping away was like landing in still water. No current. No noise. Just the unsettling quiet of real clarity.
People assumed I was angry. And I was, in parts. But more than that, I was deeply, heartbreakingly sad. Sad for what it could have been. Sad for the way we dressed up cowardice as consensus. Sad for the lives affected by our failure to act when we should have, or our insistence on acting where we shouldn't. The UN was never perfect. But it could have been better. That is what makes the grief stick.
I had to ask myself what I still believed in. Whether the idea of international cooperation was salvageable. Whether diplomacy, at its best, could still be a tool for peace rather than a cover for delay and self-interest.
And the truth is, I do still believe. Not in institutions as they are, but in what they were supposed to be. I believe in the quiet work of honest governance. In evidence-based policy. In cooperation that does not flatter itself, but actually functions. I believe in the value of national sovereignty too, and in holding international bodies to account when they exceed their remit or confuse virtue signalling with action.
I believe in the West. That is not fashionable to say, but I do. I believe in the rule of law, in open debate, in the awkward but essential idea of democracy. I believe in secular governments that protect freedom of religion. I believe in the dignity of the individual and the right to criticise power, even when that power claims to speak on behalf of the good.
I have also come to believe more fiercely in the need for energy realism. My time in policy taught me how easily science is drowned out by fear. Nuclear energy remains one of the most efficient and clean sources we have, and yet we treat it with suspicion while continuing to burn coal. That is not a strategy. It is a sentiment.
Likewise, deterrence is not barbarism. It is protection. I am more convinced than ever that the horror of nuclear weapons lies not just in their existence, but in the delusion that pretending they don’t matter will make us safer. It won’t. The world is not made more peaceful by declarations. It is made safer by preparedness, restraint, and realism.
What comes after disillusionment, then, is not cynicism. It is responsibility. You stop expecting others to get it right. You stop expecting large systems to save us. You look for the people inside those systems who are trying. You back them. You become one of them, if you can.
I began speaking more openly about what I had seen. Not to shame, but to warn. Not to burn bridges, but to light better paths. I found others who had also walked away, quietly, with their integrity intact and their optimism battered but not broken. Some of them went into public service. Others founded companies. A few simply went home and raised better children. All of it mattered.
We talk too much about saving the world and too little about making it less cruel, less careless, less slow to act when the signs are clear. What I want now is not heroism. I want competence. I want courage that does not need a camera. I want the kind of leadership that does not outsource hard decisions to endless consultations and carefully worded statements that say nothing at all.
There are still good people inside the UN. Some of them I admire deeply. They are trying. But the system they serve has become, in too many places, a performance. A stage for posturing, for bad faith arguments, for letting genocide pass while debating language that offends. That is not diplomacy. It is moral failure.
I no longer believe the UN can be fixed from within. I think it needs to be reimagined entirely or replaced by something that can deliver on the promises we keep making. The world is too fragile for polite delay.
Leaving was painful. But staying would have broken something in me. And I am still a woman of faith. Still someone who believes in service, in decency, in the quiet insistence that things must be better than this.
What comes next? I don’t know. But I know what I bring to it. Experience. Memory. Conviction without the need for applause. And a stubborn refusal to give up on the idea that good is still worth working for.
There was no explosion. No dramatic walkout. No raised voice or declaration of principle. That is not how these things happen. At least not for people like me, who were raised to be composed, who learned early that anger is best metabolised quietly. The final straw was not a straw at all. It was a quiet realisation, weeks in the making, that I could no longer be part of something I no longer respected.
It began with a report. A routine one. The kind that crosses your desk when you are on a policy team expected to balance evidence with diplomacy. I had written it carefully, drawing on weeks of research, firsthand accounts, and epidemiological data. It was not perfect, but it was honest. And it was edited. Not for clarity, but for tone. Phrases were softened, omissions made. The recommendations remained, technically, but their urgency had been stripped away. The document still bore my name.
That week I sat in three meetings where people debated whether it was "strategically sensitive" to refer to specific countries by name in reports on human rights abuses. There was concern about optics, about funding, about alliances. Not one person asked whether it was true. Only whether it was useful.
At first, I told myself this was how things worked. That sometimes you had to play the long game. That reform required patience. But I could feel something shift inside me. A kind of ethical nausea. It stayed with me through meetings, through diplomatic functions, through dinner at my desk. I could not shake it. The sense that I was complicit.
Then came a briefing. We were preparing talking points for a high-level event on the rights of women and girls. I suggested we include a reference to the treatment of Yazidi women in Iraq, who had suffered unimaginably at the hands of extremists. I was told it would make the messaging "too pointed." That it could be perceived as politically inconvenient. I said nothing. I nodded. I went back to my laptop and deleted the line.
That night I went home and cried in the shower. Not from outrage, but from shame. From the sickening awareness that I had begun to accept the unacceptable. That I had allowed my integrity to become negotiable.
It would be easy to blame others. To say I was only following instructions. But I know better. We always have a choice. And the truth is, I had been choosing the path of least resistance. Telling myself I was doing more good by staying than I could on the outside. That the machine needed people like me to stay sane. But sanity is not the same as morality. And I could no longer pretend I was doing the right thing just because I was not doing the worst.
I spoke to Seb. We hadn’t talked about the UN in years. He had gone on to other things, but I knew the disillusionment had marked him too. I told him what I was feeling. He listened. Then he said, simply, "You have always known when to walk away. You just need to trust yourself."
A week later, I handed in my resignation.
No one begged me to stay. Some looked surprised. Others seemed relieved. A few colleagues came by my office in private, telling me they understood. That they had thought about leaving too. But they had children. Mortgages. Tenure tracks. I nodded. I understood. I still do.
In my final month, I cleared out two offices. Geneva first, then New York. The quiet in both places felt different. Geneva was colder, more clinical. New York, more chaotic, less ceremonious. My last working day was in the New York office. I left in the early evening, unnoticed by most, carrying a small box of personal things that had no place in someone else’s institution.
I flew home to London that night, the city lights beneath me flickering like thoughts I had not yet faced. I didn’t sleep.
They gave me a watch as a thank you for my service. Stainless steel, with a tiny UN insignia. It was the kind of gift someone might have chosen in a bygone era, when people still thought a timepiece meant something. Retirement gifts for the faithful. It felt less like appreciation and more like ritual. A gesture that had outlived its meaning.
I donated it the next week.
What I wanted was not a watch. I wanted honesty. Accountability. A moment where someone said, “You were right to care this much.” But that never came. And perhaps that is the point. The most important recognitions are often the ones we never receive. You just have to leave anyway.
There is something strange about stepping away from a global institution. You expect to feel small. You expect to feel cut off, as though the weight and meaning of what you did will disappear without the scaffolding that made it official. But I didn’t feel small. I felt steady. For the first time in a long while, I felt like my values and my actions were back in alignment.
The work of service didn’t end when I left the UN. It changed shape. I was no longer writing policy or attending summits. I wasn’t wearing a lanyard that opened every door. But I was still me. I still cared about outcomes, not optics. About truth, not posturing. And I found that kind of work in smaller, often quieter places.
It took time to remember that service doesn’t always need an audience. Sometimes it looks like running a company that treats its staff with dignity. Sometimes it means mentoring a younger colleague, or refusing to bend the truth in a boardroom full of people who expect you to play the game. Sometimes it’s showing up for your nieces and nephews. Sometimes it’s growing food well.
In my case, I returned to something older and more honest than the institutions I had left. The land. The language of soil and seed, not slogans. I began to build again, but this time on ground I could trust. I founded an AgTech company and became its CEO. Not because I thought it would save the world, but because I wanted to be part of something that made it easier for people to feed each other. There is integrity in food. You can’t fake it. You either nourish or you don’t.
That shift from the global stage to a farm, from policy papers to climate-resilient crops, was not a retreat. It was a reorientation. It was me choosing to pour everything I had learned into something I could build with my own hands. Something measurable. Something meaningful. I no longer wanted to debate language while people starved. I wanted to grow the food.
I also started to write. Not for position papers or diplomatic briefings, but for people. Honest words. Stories that told the truth about what I had seen. Reflections on how it felt to be young and full of hope, then older and full of questions. I wrote because I didn’t want to forget. And because I wanted others to know they were not alone if they too had walked away from something they once believed in.
What I’ve learned is that service, in its truest form, is not about where you work. It’s about how you live. It’s about telling the truth, even when it’s inconvenient. It’s about carrying on quietly when no one is watching. It’s about choosing substance over performance, care over careerism, and courage over comfort.
For a long time, I thought my life would follow a certain arc. I thought I’d rise through the ranks, shape global policy, be called upon for my expertise. That version of me existed once. But she’s gone. And I’m not mourning her anymore. I’ve become someone else. Someone freer.
I still read international reports. I still track global conflicts. I still care deeply. But I no longer feel the need to be in the room where the statements are made. I want to be in the field where the solutions are planted. I want to put my hands in the earth and build something that feeds people, not just their sense of hope, but their actual bodies.
There’s a quiet pride in that. A steadiness that comes from no longer chasing approval. I don't need to be congratulated. I just want to be useful. I want to be honest. I want to sleep at night knowing I told the truth and did the work.
I believe in a new kind of service now. One rooted in realism, rigour, and humility. I believe we need people who are willing to speak plainly, to take responsibility, to rebuild broken systems from the ground up. We need people who are not seduced by prestige or paralysed by fear. We need grown-ups.
I still pray for the UN. I pray it finds its spine again. I pray it remembers what it is for. But I’m no longer waiting. I’ve found a different path. One that lets me live in accordance with my faith, my conscience, and the quiet, stubborn hope that maybe, just maybe, a better kind of leadership begins not in the halls of Geneva, but in the heart of someone who refuses to pretend.
There’s a strange kind of silence that follows disillusionment. Not the silence of despair, but the kind that comes when something finally settles. When the noise dies down and you’re left alone with the truth. It’s not always comfortable, but it is clarifying. And in that stillness, I found my footing again.
For a long time, I thought my work was only valid if it came with the right stamp. I thought I had to be part of something enormous to be useful. That belief kept me going, even as the cracks deepened. It made me swallow things I should have spoken up about. It made me stay far longer than I should have. But eventually, the weight of what I knew was too great to ignore.
The UN failed in ways that were not just bureaucratic, but moral. It hid behind process while lives were lost. It ignored warnings it had published itself. It spoke of peace while tolerating bigotry. It turned away from science when the science became politically inconvenient. And it wrapped all of this in the language of humanitarianism, as though vocabulary could absolve responsibility.
That’s what finally broke me. The performance. The refusal to reckon with its own contradictions. The way it treated faith as a liability, truth as optional, and dissent as disloyalty. Institutions cannot serve the world if they will not first examine themselves. And for all the talk of transparency and inclusion, the doors were often closed to those who asked the wrong questions.
So I no longer believe the UN can be reformed. I believe it must be dismantled and rebuilt entirely. Not because I’m angry, but because I’m realistic. You cannot retrofit integrity into a foundation that was never structurally sound. You cannot ask for accountability from a system designed to avoid it. You cannot speak of global cooperation while enabling the worst actors to dictate the terms.
The Security Council alone makes a mockery of the values the UN claims to uphold. When power is weighted toward veto-wielding states with histories of abuse, the result is paralysis. Crimes go unpunished. Conflicts are prolonged. Resolutions are watered down to the point of meaninglessness. And still, the institution persists, propped up by nostalgia and political convenience.
We are living in a different world now. The geopolitical dynamics of 1945 no longer apply. The challenges we face today — from pandemics to climate breakdown to technological disruption — require agility, trust, and courage. The UN has none of these. It has prestige, but not power. It has reach, but not relevance. It convenes, but it does not act.
I’m not calling for an end to global cooperation. I’m calling for honesty about what is broken. I’m calling for something new to take its place — something more representative, more rigorous, and more willing to change when the world does. Something that does not reward inaction, or mask political cowardice with bureaucratic language.
We need to start again. Not with legacy structures and ceremonial titles, but with clear-eyed vision and a commitment to principle over politics. We need to build something that does not collapse under its own contradictions. Something that values truth more than image. Something that belongs to all nations, not just the loudest ones.
I’m aware this sounds idealistic. But it isn’t naive. It is necessary. The alternative is to keep pretending. To keep pouring money, time, and talent into an institution that cannot deliver what it promises. That is not diplomacy. That is denial.
I’m not bitter. Bitterness is corrosive. But I am clear. I gave ten and a half years of my life to an organisation that lost its way. And I do not regret that time, because it taught me how the world works. It taught me what matters. It taught me that you can care deeply and still walk away.
I don’t think the answer lies in abolishing all institutions. I think the answer lies in rebuilding trust, one honest conversation at a time. I think it starts with people who refuse to pretend. People who are willing to say, “This is not working,” even if they have something to lose.
In the end, leaving the UN gave me back my voice. It reminded me that I don’t need permission to speak the truth. That integrity is not something conferred by title or position. It is something you hold, quietly and consistently, in the choices you make every day.
I still believe in service. But I believe in a kind of service that starts from within. One that is not performative or self-congratulatory, but grounded, unglamorous, and real. I believe in showing up. I believe in feeding people.
I don’t know if the UN will find its way back. But I no longer believe it should. It was born of a noble idea. But good ideas are not enough. They must be matched by courage and clarity. Without those, even the best intentions become theatre.