Try a Hermit Crab Essay!
Due Tuesday by 11am Submitting a text entry box or a file upload
Points 10
To record and memorialize life in quarantine, try a Hermit Crab essay.
A Hermit Crab essay is when an author inhabits an existing form in order to tell their own personal narrative. You may borrow structure from anything you can think of– from a prescription bottle label to a family recipe.
For this assignment, you have a couple of options:
Sit down with your journal- you’ll never write anything you love if you don’t write anything.
or
Anything else.
Either way, here are some guidelines to help you in your process:
Open the tab for Firestone Complete Auto-care. Get part way through scheduling an appointment to fix your van’s frayed Alternator Belt, then abandon. Don’t be afraid to do the same for the chiropractor, or your therapist.
Set up a nice workspace for yourself, like the middle seat at the kitchen table. Here, you can stare out at the house next door, following the ivy as it creeps up the purple paint and engulfs their kitchen window. There, the neighbors would post notes that you’d reply to with your roommates, until that died out. It was fun while it lasted. From this seat you can count the birds outside, identifying the different types like your grandma taught you: American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, and sometimes, a Downy Woodpecker.
Lay out all your materials, then spend an hour deleting old emails from 2014, sending the most nostalgic and the most embarrassing ones to your high school best friend. Example: The one where she asked you to keep her Snapchat streaks, but only with certain people, or the email from ‘went-on-3-dates-with-when-you -thought-you-were-straight.’
Pace around your kitchen table, open and close the fridge upwards of seven times, eating nothing. You’ve probably found that rotating from sitting in your living room to sitting in your bedroom to sitting in your kitchen is not enough movement in a day to work up an appetite. Still, getting outside is hard when there’s nowhere to go, and an anxious tummy is a full one anyways. Get creative! When you do eat, take your meals at odd hours of the day- simply wait until your stomach is the least flip floppy.
Try waiting five days to respond to several texts, then begin each reply with “Omg!!!”, as if you were just now reading their message. Note: Repetition may initially feel redundant or monotonous to you as the writer, but it can serve a crucial purpose! Don’t bother rephrasing your explanation as to why you've been MIA—hectic week, anxiety worse than normal, use plenty of emojis—go ahead and copy paste. Soon, you’ll fall into a rhythm. And they’ll understand. No really, they will. Think about how you feel when you receive that kind of text. These things are infinitely understandable. Cut yourself some slack.
Download the Headspace app, at your psychiatrist’s recommendation. Delete soon after, seeing as your iCloud storage is always full.
Download the Simple Habit app, at your psychologist’s recommendation. Better than Headspace, she says, really worth it, and your cousin agrees (she knows about things like these. She’s really turning things around recently).
Meditate for three days in a row. You might try right after waking up, the only time of the day where your still limbs won’t feel useless. Close your eyes, resting your palms on your crisscrossed knees. Settle in so fully that you wonder if something is wrong. You won’t be able to pinpoint if that feeling of bodily settled-ness is forgetting you have a body, or if it’s a remembrance.
Find a pen you love to write with! The best pens give no resistance and dry quickly on the page. The latter is crucial if the soft sides of your hands are prone to smudging, which they are. Maybe your roommate will gift you a crisp blue G2, 0.38, something really special.
Book your car appointment, finally.
When your mom texts you about that book you borrowed in September, asking for it back and “did you read it? Was it good?” tell her you’re most of the way done and “loving it!!” then abandon your writing to dive in, page 1. Your journal can wait. If the book is good, and it will be, keep going. Read for a few hours, feeling like it's summer again and you can spend all day in the old wooden lawn chair, following the sun from one side of the porch to the other. This time, in November, you follow the heat from vent to vent in your drafty old house on Myrtle.
If your partner orders a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, then orders one for you too, start a book club just the two of you. Read one section a week with discussions on Sundays, and heat up spiced apple cider for the occasion. (Hint: reading will make you want to write. Not always, but sometimes you’ll get lucky).
Meet your parents halfway between Bellingham and Seattle for a walk along Padilla Bay. Sip hot miso soup from the thermos you used to take with you to elementary school, and eat a lime green apple grown in your parents’ garden this fall, big as two fists. Bigger, even.
A Note on Reflection and Process:
Please include a note at the end of your essay that addresses the following:
1. What are some of your coping mechanisms, ones you perceive as either healthy or unhealthy?
2. Why do you feel the need to know things about your new therapist before you tell her about yourself? It puts you at ease when she wears fun dangly earrings on your third session together. How will you convince yourself that things will only improve from here, if nonlinearly?
3. What do you perceive as your strengths? What about your growth areas?
4. What might you do with yourself, with all this time?