Soft Shell Crab
Thoughts on growth
Reminders for Humans is a monthly series exploring the natural world, and how we may use its truths to guide us back to what it means to be human.
“And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
‘Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.’”
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
The way we are sold growth is easy and logical. Just grow.
Simply do it! Simply become larger, stronger than you were before. Pick what you want to be, and become it. What could be easier?
But in its midst, growth rarely feels logical or easy. It feels backwards and uncomfortable and confusing and the opposite of growth: it feels like suddenly taking three steps back. It feels shaky and uncertain. It sometimes feels terrifying.
When we are physically growing during puberty, changing from children to adolescents to adults, there is scientific terminology and explanation. There are cultural expectations and guardrails; there is a level of human forgiveness for this process. I have not felt a similar approach to emotional and personal growth: every time I’m inside of this process, I am usually the last to know. There is not much advice and wisdom circulating about this largely invisible process.
How do we know when we are growing, or when we are in danger? How do we distinguish new experiences that challenge our current construction from those that threaten our safety?
I’ll admit here, in front of God and anyone reading this, that crabs are the only living creatures on Planet Earth that give me the true creeps.
Spiders? Snakes? Whatever. Insects and lizards and centipedes and grubs and those weird fish that live at the bottom of the ocean? No biggie. But crabs? Shudder. Seeing them in real life, especially by surprise, has thrown me into absolute fits.
They dislodge something deep, pushing the most insane and irrational panic button, a button usually covered in dust and forgotten in the abandoned auxiliary building of my brain. Their weird silhouette and excessive, pointy legs. Their clunky rigid movement, primordial claws, eyeballs sitting like squishy marbles on straws. Gross! GROSS. It cleaves logic and sense away, replaces language with a blaring heat of disgust and that strange kind of fear that makes you lose your hearing for a few seconds. I’m doing my best to understand and put words to this, given the fact that no other living thing has ever triggered this kind of visceral response. It’s difficult to describe. But you get it. I’m not a fan.
However, these creepy weirdos have a profound method of growth, and that is what I want to explore here. I’ve read several articles and watched at least six videos of crabs for this research, you guys. I’m being really brave because I think they might have something to teach me.
Soft-shell crabs are not an individual species or separate classification of crab, this is instead a term used to describe a crab (for instance, a Blue Crab) that is molting: the process of abandoning its old shell and growing a new one. Without their protective armor in this phase of transition, they are especially vulnerable, prized, and easy to eat by humans and other predators.
Unfortunately for crabs, they don’t really have a choice when it comes to getting stripped down and vulnerable: their nature as arthropods means that their skeletons are external (exoskeletons) instead of internal. Their hard, structural pieces are on the outside, while their mushy living parts are on the inside. While the calcified exoskeleton of their shell stays the same size, their insides continue to grow - leaving them with the undeniable requirement of sizing up. This, or risk being cramped and squished inside a protective layer that harms them more than helps them. Fortunately, they have some precedence with this process: about 200 million years or so of practice.
In a nutshell, the process of molting goes like this.
A minuscule endocrine gland inside the crab’s eyestalk, called the Y-organ, regulates the molting cycle. When environmental conditions are right, it releases steroid hormones that encourage the crab’s muscles and tissues to grow. Its fleshy body expands until the pressure of its growth is just enough to crack the shell from the inside-out. The crab begins to separate itself from the shell, which can take up to an hour, squirming and squeezing itself out. During this process, it performs something called claw atrophy, where it makes its big front claws smaller in order to squeeze them out of their old enclosure. After untangling, it frees its claws and is out from its old shell. Now its soft mushy body is completely raw and exposed - at its highest risk of being injured or eaten. It will be without a hard shell and protection for several days. Once freed of the old shell, the crab absorbs a big gulp of sea water to “inflate” its outermost layer of skin - so that the skin becomes bigger than its current body. This outer layer of skin, now separated from the bulk of the crab by a weird bubble of sea water space, will eventually become the new exoskeleton. To help its body build a new exoskeleton, the crab eats its old shell, absorbing the calcium and nutrients from its last protective layer to rebuild a new one. After a few days of being painfully exposed, the new exoskeleton hardens bit by bit, and eventually the crab finds itself protected again from the world, this time with more room to grow.
Okay. Let’s dive in.
Despite its sickening nature, understanding this process of molting has been extremely valuable lately - serving as guidance, a roadmap. Giving me language and visuals for what growth really feels like. For the outside observer, it’s clear: the crab is growing. It will no longer fit in its old shell, so it must molt and grow a new one. We watch the crab from above and have every bit of faith that it will do this very thing; release its current home, survive the vulnerability, grow a new shell, and become safe and comfortable again. From the crab’s perspective, this outcome probably feels much less certain.
It is therefore comforting to imagine that every time its insides start to expand beyond the limits of its current world, a crab might be feeling confused and pissed and scared. Once it hears the crack, feels fresh cool water leaking through its shell, maybe it says what the hell? Or, why does this keep happening to me? And possibly even, Nope! I just did this a few months ago! I’m tired!
A crab might, for instance, feel the same way a human woman does. A crab and I, for instance, might have a lot to discuss over a glass of wine.
To grow is to molt. To change and expand is to leave behind what is no longer serving you. But growing is not a box to check. Rather, it is a process of deep discomfort. It is a stripping away of armor and becoming painfully tender in service of an uncertain future.
Intermolt
You were doing great. You didn’t have a concern in the world, really. At least, no existential ones. Most things were easy and manageable, most days and weeks were unremarkable, enjoyable, typical, predictable. You were feeling at the top of your game, sailing through life and work and relationships and the passage of time. Then one day you noticed a pinching sensation, a little bit of squeezing in certain parts. No biggie. Time passed and you awoke each day a little more smooshed. You’re not sure why - you didn’t choose this. It’s confusing and uncomfortable, but hopefully it’ll be over soon.
The Crack
Jesus. Something just happened.
You might not be exactly sure what happened, or you might know precisely what woke you from your comfortable existence, but the result is the same: there’s a crack in your shell. The foolproof defense you’ve relied on for stability is no longer foolproof, no longer the same, no longer able to protect you completely. This armor simply won’t work the same anymore- it’s too small.
But you’re not ready! You’re not ready to leave it, to start all the way over again. You liked that shell. You worked hard to build it. And so you spend time ignoring the crack, going about your life just the same, and it is mostly the same, except for the cool sea water leaking through to your insides reminding you of the fissure. Except for the clunkiness and newly-awkward fit of the shell on your claws, your legs, which make it difficult to catch prey and eat, or scurry and scuttle away from turtles and birds. Except for how hard it is to take a deep breath.
The old shell has become a liability.
Maybe you can fix it, though! Maybe if you stay small and motionless, it can repair itself. A miracle could occur. Things could go back to normal, back to the way they were before.
And at the same time you’re wishing to stay the same, although you don’t want to admit it to yourself or anyone else, you can feel a new layer, a new reality, quietly forming just underneath the old one. Layered right up against it. But it’s sheer and weak and barely visible. It’s not fully formed yet. It’s not close to a shell, it’s not even a callus. It certainly can’t protect you the same way, but it is there, softly and quietly forming. Pulsing with a flicker of life.
Each morning you wake up, the connection between your Self and your shell is a little looser. The fit a little less snug.
Squirm
Clues that you might be growing:
Your protections are working, but squeezing and pinching you, too.
You find yourself having to shrink in order to stay safe and comfortable.
There are side-effects to the shell you’ve inhabited that didn’t exist before.
You have two options: stay safe in a shell that’s too small; or risk discomfort for a bigger version of yourself.
Should you choose the latter, you’ll need to squirm and squeeze yourself out. This will not be comfortable. This will actually be scary and dangerous, as more and more of you leaves the safety of the shell and moves out into the world fully exposed. It will feel like your insides are suddenly on your outsides (because they basically are), and you’ll spend time disentangling yourself from your past self. While the crab is moving through this portion of molting, its claw muscles are forced to constrict and become smaller so that they can squeeze out of their custom-made, calcite boxing gloves.
For a few moments there, you’ll live inside of a one-step-forward, two-steps-back bubble. Your body is mostly out in the open ocean, being cooled and encouraged by the saltwater, and your claws - your most valuable weapon - are stuck in a too-small shell. Should you go back? Should you keep leaving?
Panic.
Panic.
More panic.
You really squirm now. You’re realizing just how much you want to be freed of that old shell, that old protector. You work and struggle and pull yourself out, now certain of your wish to leave. You’re desperate to be free again.
Until, blessedly, your claws are out. You’re separate again. You taste relief.
Make space for something bigger
Once you’re free of the binding shell, you must do something counterintuitive: make your rawness even bigger.
You must puff yourself up, absorb gulps of sea water to inflate the outer layer of your soft new shell, so it floats above you. There is a space now, between you and what will be your next shell, your next suit of armor.
This phenomenon can happen without conscious awareness. Now that you’re back to square one, there are suddenly new possibilities for yourself that you hadn’t considered before, new possibilities that couldn’t have happened in your old too-small shell. Your life can be bigger, more colorful. Who can you be next, now that your previous barriers are gone? Maybe you’ll be the kind of crab who gets up early to run, who learns to play the piano, who spends a year abroad. Maybe your next shell can be purple, you’ll start a bookclub, you’ll say no more often and you’ll say yes more often and these times you’ll really mean it.
Other times it happens with absolute awareness and intention: we have outgrown our old shell in favor of a new, less clingy and rigid one. We know who and what we want to be next, so we make space for it.
When your feelings are intense enough, it triggers a bubble of space. This space can be filled with longing, excitement, curiosity. It can also be filled with uncertainty and fear and dread. But you feel compelled, regardless, to expand to something bigger. Maybe this is because there is always a portion of this bubble that is devoted to the mystery; to what you can’t know yet about what’s to come.
Take what serves you
What protected you before still has value.
Eat it and add it to the new shell you’re building – the bigger version, the version that gives you space to grow. The old shell wasn’t evil or bad. It was just too small for the soft, sweet flesh inside of you that wants to do what life is programmed to do: grow. Because that shell was made up of every past shell, too – every bit of wisdom and experience that taught you how to protect yourself. All of those calcified lessons matter: they created your protection. Now you should pick them apart and rearrange them into the next version of your safety. Don’t worry, this will only repeat over and over again forever.
In your first shell, for the smallest version of yourself, perhaps the building blocks of safety were: Stay quiet and easy and need nothing. But in future versions, to stay quiet would have suffocated you. Was it helpful at some point? Yes. Is it helpful now? Not so much.
At your current size, now several molting through, you might still have some flecks of color from your original building blocks. Stay quiet and need nothing is probably still a part of you, but now only a small percentage.
Your old protections don’t just disappear. They don’t float away into oblivion, never to be seen again. Those too-small shells matter, because they saved our lives once. We don’t need to abandon them completely, though that feels clean and logical. Clean and logical is not how growth works or feels, remember? To abandon what once served and saved you is, in some ways, to abandon yourself. At each step, you’ve done the best you could. At each step, you survived. Do not turn your back on your attempts to protect yourself. Do not villainize your shelters.
Absorb and honor what has served you, and allow it to be digested and mutated into something new.
Wait
What’s the prize for growing? What’s the point of continuing down this incessantly masochistic path forever?
As if this whole process wasn’t already difficult enough, now comes the waiting.
Assuming a crab could possess consciousness, it’s likely not a conscious decision to molt. I’d venture it feels just as terrifying as it does for us when we face a similar point of no return.
Does a crab find itself in purgatory, soft-shelled with no protection, feeling everything with intensity for hours and days on end and think, Why does this matter anyway? Why do I need to be any bigger? Why grow a new shell at all? This level of feeling and pain is so strong that I might as well be plucked out of the tide this very instant by something that will eat me- which would likely be less painful than sitting here feeling and hurting and waiting.
I’m pretty sure, after reading a few studies and watching several time-lapse videos of crabs enduring this process, that scientifically there is nothing to do to speed up the process of growing a new shell. Nothing to do but wait.
You can feel the new shell growing a few inches from you, you can see it coming to life and forming but not solid, not complete. Like in gym class when you play with the parachute- holding it in a circle and in unison, pulling it up towards the ceiling so you can run under it, where you watch it sink and float slowly down towards you. There is space between you and it. You are still so deeply deeply exposed and pained and vulnerable and dangerous. You want to close this space. You want to be stronger and feel less. You want to have armor again.
Some questions you may ask while in this liminal space:
When is it going to get better?
What do I have to do for this to be over?
What do I get for having experienced the pain of exposure without running away from it?
Why bother getting bigger, anyway?
Am I doing this wrong?
I wonder if my old shell is still around here, somewhere. I could probably find it. I could probably squeeze back into it.
Are there any hungry birds nearby that would like to end this for me?
How do I fix this?
You cannot fix this.
Maybe because there is nothing to fix - maybe your current experience is the fixing, but in slow-motion. And when there is nothing you can do, it’s time to recognize this period for what it really is: the time of surrender.
Surrender feels wrong and pathetic. There are few things we surrender to, after all - the word has a connotation of defeat, and we are hard-pressed to accept defeat. Surrender means to submit to an authority, and when you surrender, this means you are no longer the authority of your own growth. It’s unclear who or what the authority is, exactly, but maybe it’s this process of waiting. We will fight until there’s nothing left before we consider surrendering to what is happening, surrender to what is real. But guess what? You don’t have a choice anymore. You are not the authority. You are not in control.
So ask yourself: what is real? What is real right here, and right now?
The cool sea water, which has never felt this chilling and stark. The soft caress of the seagrass, which is usually held at bay by a hard shell. The soft blanket of sand supporting you. The inescapable fragility of your soft body, alone in a vast ocean. How that same fragility brings you to a new kind of communion with every other being in that vast ocean. The level of sensation you now have, to everything. The overwhelm of noticing. The pain.
At the boiling down of everything is the pain.
Pain is both the medicine and the poison. It has stripped you down to nothing, to your most vulnerable, in order to meet you and be seen and felt - once and for all - in its enormity. This pain has killed the old version of you in order to birth the next. Pain is, in this way, productive. Nothing else could have pushed you into such a horrible process, an excruciating existence; almost nothing else could bring you to somewhere you’ve never been before.
While you sit in this waiting room, in limbo and suspension, you are not just tortured to sit still and take it. This is also a time when you will learn a deeply valuable skill, one you’ll sharpen and take with you even when your shell has hardened into safety again. When you are exposed and vulnerable, when you live inside these big feelings without an escape, you cannot do the same things you used to do when you were shelled and protected. You cannot perform the same, feel the same, fight the same. You must care for yourself differently now. You must make a sincere effort to tend to yourself: your body that is now tender and tired and easily bruised.
When you are exposed, you cannot take the advice of those whose shells shine and pluck with rigidity. Those with strong shells, and those who hide within cracked shells, are not allowed to tell you what to do. You are somewhere different now. You are in a new kind of existence. No one will be able to protect you now but you; no one’s advice is accurate but your own. While their directives may be well-meaning, their state of content safety or their unwillingness to molt their own protections away means that it can only be so helpful, so accurate.
You will understand now that all those times you pandered at a soft-shell crab about how to fix its situation, you were out of your realm. You didn’t know; you couldn’t until now - until you went through it yourself. You will recognize how sacred and unique and personal this process is; how little you can offer others going through it, aside from stopping yourself from trying to fix it for them, or pushing away their naked vulnerability out of your own fear.
Perhaps the only flicker of light that gets you through this winter is to know, somewhere deep in yourself, that the only way out of the pain is through it. If you rob yourself of experiencing and allowing pain, you’ll never make it to the rebirth that waits for you on the other side. You’ve never been more broken than you are now; the parts that you believed made you you are gone, lost, disintegrated. But somehow there is still a you there; quiet and translucent and barely visible. But present. Bigger than you remember yourself.
This is an expansive place, so both are true: you are gone, and you are here. You are broken down, and you are bigger than before.
Blue crabs live for only 3 years, and half of that time is spent molting and growing. They can only mate when they are soft-shelled; they can only shepherd new life into existence when they are at their most vulnerable. Isn’t that interesting?
Intermolt
Amidst moments of feeling everything, you notice that the water feels a little less stark against your flesh. You have glimpses of the shine that’s developing on your new shell as it calcifies, hardens amidst the minerals and salt of the water. A few days pass and you realize your eyestalks don’t burn against the salty water, or feel as sensitive to the sun. You still feel exposed and vulnerable, but the new shell is starting to thicken, and the pain and sensation of living is not as all-consuming as it was a few days ago.
Days pass. Meals are eaten. You see you friends in the seagrass and for a time you forget the reality of your rawness. One day you scramble along the sand and hear a ping as a pebble bumps off of your back through the current. It hit you, and you didn’t feel it. It hit you, and you didn’t blink. It seems you might have a shell again.
You feel surprised, but not really. You feel grateful, but not really. You feel a little more whole.
There is nothing you can do to speed up the process of your own growth, but I firmly believe you can prevent it from dragging on forever. I think you do this by Being Fully In It.
Growing is the worst part of anything at all. The middle ground, with no clear path and total uncertainty and on top of that - extreme discomfort - is laughably terrible. It’s no wonder we resist growth in so many areas of life and development. Why bother? If you’re going to have pain either way, you might as well choose the pain you know.
Strong and mature and peaceful and confident and equanimous and loving and – whatever adjective you want to use to describe yourself in the future – a state in which “this” is “easy” – will absolutely never feel easy in the process of getting there. We don’t wake up one day, fully formed with impenetrable armor. We don’t experience growth that way, because that’s not growth. That’s just putting on Anchor Arms, those blowup balloon muscle arms from SpongeBob.
The crab is such an interesting and helpful metaphor for this concept of growth then. Probably it wants to be big and strong and impenetrable and stay that way forever. It looks up to its giant crustacean ancestors, and then remembers the reality of who it is right now: cramped, squeezed, uncomfortable. Wanting to grow bigger means leaving behind the shell that’s been protecting you. It means becoming shaky and vulnerable and extremely uncomfortable.
This world doesn’t teach us to navigate our lives by feeling; it teaches us to shame, repress, intellectualize them away. So it’s no wonder that when we enter a molting of our own, a process guided solely by feelings and sensations that are 1.) huge 2.) rarely quantifiable or logical, and 3.) not going anywhere anytime soon, we feel more lost and alone than ever.
Feeling it all without running away is a skill. Making space for a bigger version of yourself, creating a void that invites uncertainty and fear and doubt and pain, is a skill. It will show you a future where you can hold even more than you thought possible, and then it will prove to you that you can. It will prove it by making you do it and survive.
Do not half-ass your growth.
Do not half-heart your life.
Because the prize for growing is becoming big enough to carry it all. And if you stop halfway, someone will definitely try to eat you.
Thank you for reading Reminders for Humans, and for your acceptance of excessive metaphor and anthropomorphism. I’m so grateful you’re here.
xoxo, Sarah