March Shell Exchange

Welcome to the March 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. What Not to Ask Me About My Long COVID by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic

“Before I got long COVID, I tuned out virtually all stories about it. They were tedious because I was tired of the pandemic, because we are all tired of the pandemic, because it is as familiar as rain and honestly just as dreary; I can hardly believe we once called the coronavirus novel.”

2. Should Have Left Him Then: A Mad Lib by Haylu May Cox in Brevity 🦀

“Your boyfriend is downstairs in the basement playing drinking games when you go up for water and a break from all the noise. A significantly younger boy stands in the kitchen, and he asks you who you know. You learn he is trying to get a dungeons & _________ (creature, plural) campaign going (creature, plural) with your cousin, so you both pull out your phones and exchange _________ (plural noun, innocuous). During this (plural noun, innocuous) exchange, your boyfriend pushes past you and out the door. He has been watching.”

3. In the Stormy Sea, a Life Preserver by Brooke Siem in First Person Singular

“My stomach turns, but not from seasickness. I am in psychiatric drug withdrawal after spending half my life—and my entire adult life—on a cocktail of antidepressants first prescribed to me as a teenager. Now, at 30 years old, what started as an attempt to recalibrate my psychiatric baseline has morphed into a global quest to discover an unmedicated life.”

4. Doctors, Not Dealers by Zoe Adams in Guernica

“During medical school, my first introduction to caring for people with addiction was in a primary care office two flights up from a methadone clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. I heard countless stories from patients on methadone: people losing their jobs after starting treatment, having to hide the fact that they were on meds from their friends and employers, not being able to get take-home doses for years despite ‘good behavior,’ wanting to get off methadone so they could feel free again.”

5. A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain by Imani Perry in The New York Times

“It is only because my mother called and complained repeatedly that my doctor granted me a referral to see a rheumatologist. I don’t remember much about him except that he talked to my breasts more often than my face, and that he developed a habit of laughing at me. I often heard him laughing in the hallway as tears rolled down my cheeks.”

6. When Food Kills by Morgan Baker in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

“I met my husband a year after he developed a shellfish allergy after eating lobster his whole life. I watched him turn gray and pass out at a wedding after he ate corn that had been roasted with the lobster. He didn’t have his EpiPen then either. But we were lucky. Two wedding guests who were nurses attended to him, dissolving Benadryl in water and forcing it down his throat as his windpipe closed up. The paramedics arrived, and between the nurses, the ambulance, and the hospital, he lived to marry me a month later.”