January Shell Exchange

Welcome to the January 2025 Shell Exchange!

Midway through each month, I drop a list of recommended reads. I try to feature winning hermit crab essays (🦀) when possible. But those charming crabbies aren’t always easy to find. So I also make it a point to share pieces on invisible illness.

If you come across an essay or article I haven’t mentioned that you feel warrants attention, drop the link in the comments, and I’ll add it to the rotation next month.

1. Hospital Journal by Kathryn Savage from Guernica 🦀

“Machines beep at uneven intervals, like frogs in a wetland. Circulated air pushes out of silver pipes, metallic arteries that lengthen behind thin walls. I look up at the drop-tile ceiling. Porous flesh.”

2. When Your Book Tour is Interrupted by a Near-Death Experience by M Dessler from LitHub

“Five is a reasonable number, serious but neither hysterical nor presumptuous. Few of us, it turns out, want to claim we are in terrible, the very worst, pain. Like a bigot in a soup line, we keep our balance, our composure, by being certain there is a class of people somewhere else worse off.”

3. Listen, and You Will Hear Pain Speak by Liz Iversen from First Person Singular on Memoir Monday

“My pain manifested itself in myriad ways: the constant dull ache of tense muscles; a burning sensation in my upper back; fingertips that stung at the touch of a phone; pain when turning a doorknob, typing on the computer or flushing the toilet, as if my forearm muscles had been sliced by microscopic knives.”

4. I’m Not Going to Pop: In Search of Better Pregnancy Metaphors by Finn Schubert from Mutha Magazine*

“But as a writer, I can tell you that plot structures matter. The shape of a story matters. And I am not willing to live or narrate my pregnancy from inside the shape of what appears to be a conventional cis male orgasm.”

*Okay, so I recognize that I’m stretching things a bit with this recommendation, but it’s so beautifully written and poignant that I felt it deserved to be included.

5. “Why am I having to explain this?”: Seven stories of barriers to reproductive care for those with disabilities by Isabella Cueto from STAT

“Kaufman didn’t want an epidural, and had said so. She’d spent many months of her life unable to move her legs after a surgery to remove infected tissue from her spine, and had no desire to lose sensation in her lower body during birth. But clinicians insisted, telling her she had to get an epidural or leave the hospital and return when her cervix was more dilated. ‘I spent 11 hours of labor in this dissociative state, trying not to panic.’”

6. “I want people to see us”: A writer gives voice to long Covid and mothering from bed by Isabella Cueto from STAT

“It’s meant finding my baseline level of activity — staying in bed — and avoiding mental, physical, and emotional overexertion. A trip out of the house to go to the doctor or even a couple of hours out of bed for a kid’s birthday party typically means days of recovery during which I experience dramatic increases in symptoms, including pain and cognitive dysfunction.”

7. Mono? In Your Mid-50s? by Sari Botton from Oldster

“We might never have arrived at that diagnosis if I hadn’t self-advocated, something I’ve had to do since I was 18 and needed to push for diagnostic surgery to diagnose my endometriosis. During one of my many doctors’ appointments, I asked, ‘Could this be mono?’ My doctor immediately dismissed the idea.”

8. Callers keep flooding 988 mental health, suicide line by Amanda Seitz from Associated Press

“‘The call volume is, in some instances, well beyond what we anticipated,’ said Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, assistant secretary for mental health and substance use in the Department of Health and Human Services. ‘It does let us know that people are struggling, people are having a hard time. Where I feel heartened is that people are getting connected to services and supports, as opposed to struggling on their own.’”

9. Trying to stay awake by Jenny Diski from London Review of Books

“Instead of trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say – and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93. And if we happened to live to 93 then we’d effectively be . . . oh, even older. Plus the nap time. Sleep, we’re told, is essential, repairing the wear and tear on body and mind, but sex was once solely for the purpose of propagating the species and we pretty much found a workaround for that biological constraint.”