Cracking open
Sooner or later, like moulting crabs, we may need to shed our armour in order to grow.
For the past few years, as a result of a difficult and life-changing decision in my personal life, I have been somewhat in hiding, like a crab under a rock.
In earlier stages of my life, I've found meaning and liberation in open-hearted exploration through my writing - three books of existential wanderings and wonderings, articles in which I am the subject of my own experiments , some forays into fiction and fictionalised drama, and various freelance journalistic dabblings in the extraordinary lives of people I meet along the way.
But in my 40s and early 50s, I've felt myself in a more disconcerting space. The rigours and rewards of parenting, big shifts in the job market, a failure to deliver a fourth book as promised, and the difficult transition out of a much-treasured marriage have combined to send me scuttling for cover.
Meet the mutineer
Recently I've been befriending the mutinous crab within me, and learning to love him. He wears his armour on the outside, to protect his softness within. He is very good at saying no, at making boundaries, like a close-protection officer who has my back and will hustle me out of the building if public situations get edgy.
I like that he's trying to protect me from the world. Crabs have very hard boundaries, their skin being chitin, unyielding. Try prizing a crab out from under a rock and you realise how well equipped they are for digging in and resisting.
They tend towards individualism, the habitual questioner, the expert critic of the status quo and yet they are peculiarly ill-equipped to start anything like a revolution, or any kind of personal expansion.
Crabs in a bucket
Witness the metaphor of "crabs in a bucket" or "crab mentality", born of anecdotal claims that while any one crab can easily start to climb out, it will nonetheless be pulled back in by the others, to the detriment of all. Like tall poppy syndrome: "if I can't have it, neither can you".
But this is humans at their worst, defended, individualistic, travelling sideways and hopeless in groups. However, the crab also needs to grow - and for that, it will need to take off its armour, quite literally. I find this a tender and extraordinary moment of vulnerability, which feels intimately familiar to me.
The wonder of the inevitable
Here’s how it happens:
a) the old shell begins to soften and erode as the rudimentary beginnings of a new shell form under it.
b) when the time is right, the crab takes in a lot of water to pressurise the old shell from inside.
c) at a line of weakness along the back edge of the carapace, the pressure cracks open the shell.
d) the crab must then painstakingly extract its softened interior self – including its legs, mouthparts, eyestalks, and even the lining of the front and back of the digestive tract – from the old shell.
e) this is a difficult and prolonged process. If the creature gets stuck, it will die. If a predator happens across it during this process, it's also curtains.
f) assuming the crab manages to free itself, the creature is extremely soft and hides until its new shell has hardened over a period of days and weeks.
g) while the new shell is still soft, the crab can expand it to make room for future growth. It might also eat its old shell for sustenance.
h) for females, the time of soft shell is when mating takes place - the generating of new life.
Surrendering to change
The fact that I'm so moved by this process - which must happen many times during a crabs life, to allow growth - makes me wonder: am I in this phase just now? Eating my old shell? Waiting for a solid shape to form?
Note that the crab does not ultimately control the how and when it grows, surrendering instead to a mix of nature, hormones, necessity and circumstance. Does this sound familiar? Would we ever choose to crack open if it was within our control?
As I step more fully into my work supporting the magnificent mutiny of midlife transition, and explore the scary/exquisite vulnerability of a new relationship, I salute the metamorphosis of the crab. I welcome everything it tells me about human growth, which can be so painful.
At times in life, we have so outgrown the armour of our beliefs, taken in so much new information that this will crack the carapace and enable us to back out of the whole supporting exoskeleton of our worldview.
Fear and Aliveness
It is a perilous and vulnerable time, and if we get stuck or impeded it can become a crisis in which we are neither in or fully out of our old shells. My wish for all of us in this time is less self-judgement and more kindness and self-compassion.
The time after we have emerged we will feel extremely vulnerable and may hide from the world while our new shell grows and hardens. The more we expand the shell while it is soft, the more space we have for future growth.
I want to trust that there is a season for hiding and a season for coming back out into the world, enlarged and ready to engage again with vigour and love.
I feel excited and cautious as I grow the exoskeleton of my four beloved archetypes - the crab, the jellyfish, the albatross and the salmon - and wonder how they will fare in the world.
Half way through Second Wind, my online course, I can feel the tingle and resonance of a new purpose and future forming - and the connection to a growing community of others metamorphosing around me - but without the security of seeing exactly what our finished shape will be.
My shell is bigger than before but my innards are soft and alive.
How about you?