Today, we have Blair Thornburg’s gentle, beautiful love letter to sea shanties and what they meant to her while she tapered off Seroquel: How Shanties and Songs of the Sea Helped Me Weather the Storm of Depression.

After his own bout of seafaring, Felix Fabri, a fifteenth-century Dominican friar, wrote that “work at sea is very heavy, and is only carried on by a concert between one who sings out orders and the laborers who sing in response [. . .] great weights are dragged by their means.” For a time in my life there was a great weight to be dragged, and with the sea shanties, I dragged it.