When I started writing this newsletter, blog, whatever you want to call it on Substack, my goal was pretty simple: highlight what it means to live with invisible illness through the lens of hermit crab essays.

That was in 2022—an entire lifetime ago.

I regret nothing I wrote, but I found myself struggling to fit my words and thoughts into those hermit crabs every week (or, later on, two weeks). It became a chore—ranking almost up there with dusting the house. I still wanted to speak on these things, but without the confines of a chosen “shell.”

Then, of course, 2025 arrived and blew up the world.

As anyone with an invisible condition will tell you, burnout is a very real thing. Stringing even two words together became a challenge, whether or not I felt compelled to speak up. It’s also when I realized I needed to say (scream) things without hedging myself in with another structure.

And without prettifying my words to avoid stepping on sensibilities.

Like any (ir)rational individual, I took some time away to rethink what I wanted to do with this space.

Fast forward to January 2026, and I have a clearer vision of what I need to say and how I need to say it. While you’ll certainly find hermit crab essays sneaking into the feed, I’ve decided to change the “invisible” part of my writing to the things I feel get overlooked, untalked of, and pushed aside.

There’s more than one definition of “invisible,” after all.