Grace (When the world becomes too much, I look to the bugs)

Written by Grace Leung

December 6th 2024, I’m laying in bed, trying not to pass out from exhaustion and arthritic back pain, using all the energy I have left to message my workmates that I won’t make the Christmas party. I have been here before, many times over more than a decade, over which I have NOT learned how to do the self-care and compassion thing. What an idiot!

I have been working for a sustainable world for close to 20 years now. I have been covered in bitey Aztec ants in biodynamic coffee plantations in Mexico, worked with communities in Samoa and Timor Leste to find a balance between environmental sustainability and social development, surveyed quadrats of funky plants in New Zealand (in a dust storm!), Tasmania, and Western Australia, worked with citizen scientists to rediscover an endangered fish in urban waterways and counted pink dolphins in the waters of South China (yes, they are real, no I was not on drugs, look up Sousa chinensis). These are just a few moments that I am most proud of and have brought me the most joy. But in the last 10 years, I have also found myself on many occasions, in bed, my broken body unable to move, my exhausted mind a cloud of thick fog. 

How did I get here? Where will I end up? As far as I can tell, my journey started when my family moved from Hong Kong to New Zealand when I was 6 years old. We rented a modest house in South Auckland which, in 1990, had a horse paddock across the driveway and an abandoned orchard behind the property. We would pick gnarly looking pears, apples and lemons from the orchard and on the stroll home, feed the horses. As a kid from the concrete jungle who had barely seen grass before, now I found that FOOD COMES FROM TREES??? This blew my mind. From there it was a path of exploration from picking up bugs in the school playground to finding oysters and sea urchins and crabs in tidal rock pools. Over the years, the exploration expanded into consciousness about how humanity has exploited our land and our oceans and polluted our skies. We are also capable of treating other humans in a profoundly ugly way. Thus began my journey as a conservationist and decades of my brain hopscotching between “I have the power to change this world” and “If I don’t try to change this world, I am garbage”. (Why yes, I do go to therapy!)

Because I see the environment, society and the economy as deeply interconnected, and I could never figure out what I was good at, I bounced around different jobs to tackle the sustainability challenge from different angles. From field ecology research on insects in agroecosystems, to humanitarian aid and community development to participatory environmental policy development to organic certification. Every few years I would be overcome by the feeling that I was in the wrong field and go back to university.

The common thread between all these lines of work was that I would exhaust myself to try to make the most impact on the world. Of course this took a toll on my body and I found myself increasingly riddled with aches and pains and exhaustion. My solution? Do more! Yoga, bike rides and scuba diving! More time in nature will heal me! If someone told me how they were impressed by how much I got done, I secretly thought “Yes, because I am super woman.” So imagine my surprise when, one day in 2012, I had moved to another city to start yet another postgraduate qualification, I woke up, sat up and the pain in my spine and between my ribs was so intense that I was completely winded and my eyes filled with stinging tears. Within a few weeks, I also developed debilitating stomach pains, which would turn my guts into tumbleweeds if I so much as took a sip of water.

The next few years were dotted with doctors telling me I probably just had bad posture and stress. To take some panadol for it. I had days where I couldn’t turn over in bed, let alone get up. I ended up in the emergency room several times.  It finally took being assigned a random new GP who had Crohn’s disease to catch on that I might have an autoimmune condition, or several. She ordered some blood tests which showed that I have HLA-B27 positive ankylosing spondylitis and enteropathy (my spine is fusing together and my stomach is eating itself because my immune system thinks my own body is the enemy). This happened 6 years after that day that I sat up in bed, completely winded. 

At this stage, I thought the best course of action would be to leave my job in environmental policy and governance and find my ikigai. Ikigai is the Japanese concept of finding the sweet spot between what you’re passionate about, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. In my heart, what I was most passionate about was crawling around the ground looking at bugs! And I was pretty good at it! In a world facing a biodiversity crisis where invertebrates are constantly overlooked, of course we needed more research in insect ecology! And how would I get paid for it? Why I’ll do a PhD of course! This will give me the work-life balance and self-care that I needed!!!

Things started looking up! I decided to move to Queensland, where the warm weather would soothe my aching bones. I sold my house in New Zealand, split up with my unsupportive partner and went gallivanting around the Galapagos and the Americas before I started the academic journey that would turn my life around and land me in my ikigai sweet spot! For the first year it was peachy! I traipsed around alpine meadows in Tasmania, surveying plants and insects in climate change experiments while wombats wombled around me. I did the same in wildflower country, in the wheatbelt of Western Australia, looking at the impact of expansive monoculture on pollinator communities. I was giddy with the life choices I’d made. Never mind the physical demands of living in a campervan for 3 months and being so exhausted that one day I’d parked next to a wheat field, fallen asleep and woke up to someone knocking on the van door, horrified that someone was in the van, because they were spraying nasty agrichemicals all around me. I was so physically dead that I had not heard all the giant farm machinery roaring around me. 

Then came the writing part. Up until this point, I was always academically astute. I always got good grades in the biological sciences (just don’t talk to me about chemistry) and I loved writing. So why was I now struggling so much with my literature review? Every article I read immediately leached out of my brain. I could not seem to retain any information at all, let alone remember all of the literature and synthesise and analyse all of it to form a coherent hypothesis. The years leading up to my PhD, I did notice that I was making more and more little mistakes and becoming more forgetful. I put it down to the perils of old age. But now it was getting in the way of my new life!

My GP suggested that I complete a neuropsychological assessment to see if there was anything wrong with my brain besides being over 30. After many months on a waiting list, the assessment results finally showed that, while most of my neurological functions were in the 95th percentile, some, such as my working memory and other executive functions, scored  more than 80% less than expected. A psychiatrist put this down to neurological damage due to chronic pain and inflammation and oh, I have probably also had ADHD my whole life!! Like many women who have recently been diagnosed later in life, my ADHD symptoms as a child probably presented differently from what has been studied in boys. We probably coped with a combination of intelligence and behaving as  we’re told. But as life’s difficulties build and build, eventually, these coping mechanisms fail us in our 30s and 40s. 

I did everything I could to scrape through my candidature review, but I didn’t pass. Around the same time, my dad was showing neurological symptoms which suggested the onset of Alzheimers. It turned out to be a sleeping disorder but at the time, it seemed impossible not to call it quits. Did I mention that it was 2020 and a little virus stopped us from travelling anywhere for field work?

Fast forward to January 2025. I have just started another work year as a self-employed organic auditor and sustainable agriculture consultant. Both opportunities that came up after the PhD epic failure, which I am grateful for. But I am still exhausted, overwhelmed and terrified at the idea of trying to encourage farmers and investors to take action on climate change and biodiversity loss in a world where Trump is once again about to take power.

My anxiety is on overdrive. Instead of feeling empowered by the work that I do, every choice from the macro to the micro seems like a no-win situation. If I forget to bring my Keep cup to the cafe, I feel like a monster. But then I just got back from a trip to Brazil, where every item in every purchase still seems to be enshrouded in a plastic bag. What difference does it really make? Do I go back to being vegan when I’m actively working with cattle farmers to become carbon neutral? Do the downsides of carbon farming justify the means to an end? How do I afford to offset my emissions and buy an electric car when my broken body only allows me to work part time? In a world where our ‘wicked problems’ are becoming more complex, the complexities also seem to become more extreme. I know I am looking at the world through a pessimistic lens partly because my body is in pain and that’s all it sees. Nobody, even the cleverest, most passionate of people, seem to have the answers, but at least in that, we are not alone. All I can do is remember to crawl around the dirt and look at the bugs.