The Channel Whelk Analysis

The pinnacle experience of my life so far occurred at the end of my junior year. I stood onstage and held my breath as I reveled in the surrealness of the moment. For everyone else on stage, their dreams since freshman year were coming true. However, I had not dared dream of such an event. My predecessor attached the pin to my blazer and just like that, it was official. In only a few months upon arriving to this school, I had been assigned prefect. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote an essay entitled the “Channeled Whelk”. In it, she observes a shell that once was the home to a hermit crab and she wondered why he left this shell behind. Upon reading this essay, I found myself relating with the crab. I realized that the day that I found a new shell

As soon as I left Jamaica, every aspect of my life that I had grown to loathe had been altered in some way. I gained better friends, my academics escaped their dark depths and people saw my character. In Jamaica, I heard the word ‘potential’ so often that I even began showing people that they were wrong and that I had no potential. As soon as I moved, I saw the potential everyone was talking about because I discovered that I am smart and capable but I simply needed a different environment. Often I feel as if these moments of grief never happened at all. The reason for that is because once you gain a new shell, there are few remnants of your old one. I now know what excellence feels like. Up on that stage receiving my merit for years of hardships - that is excellence. When hermit crabs have outgrown their shell, they shed it and look for a new one. Sometimes they will go bare before they find their new home. Those months between my depart from Jamaica and the prefect pinning ceremony, I had been bare, looking for a shell which fit me and one that I would be proud to carry. My channeled whelk is tinted with champagne and beige, smooth in texture and perfected with fibonacci. I am a hermit crab - I mature, I change, I