Some lines stick. You don't know why.
This one comes from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Indy is sinking in quicksand. His son throws him a snake to use as a rope. "Grab the snake", he says. And Indy, who has stared down every imaginable danger, can't bring himself to grab it.
So he says: "Don't call it a snake."
It's a joke, of course. The whole franchise runs on Indy's fear of snakes. But the line has a weight that the humour doesn't quite explain.
Names have power - not mystical, but practical. When you name something, you call up everything the name carries.
But if you don't call it that? If you call it a rope?
The thing stays the same. The danger stays the same. What shifts is your relationship to it. You create just enough distance to move.
I think about this on days where you reach the evening and the only honest summary is: I survived.
And "survived" sounds like failure. It implies you should have thrived, or at least coped with grace. It measures you against some imagined version of yourself who handles things better.
But what if, instead, I said, “I did enough.”
The weight doesn't disappear. But it stops telling you what kind of person you are. You're telling it.
There's a term for this – cognitive reappraisal. Psychologists have studied how reframing an experience changes both the emotional response and the physiological one.
This came as more of a confirmation than a revelation. You already know this works. You've done it a hundred times without knowing what it was called.
The reframe isn't magic. Some days it holds; some days it doesn’t. Sometimes you call it "a challenge" and your body knows full well it's fear. Sometimes it delays the wave, rather than dissolving it.
And maybe that's enough. A strategy doesn't have to be permanent to matter. Sometimes five hours of relief is the difference between drowning and staying afloat.
Returning to the image - Indy in the quicksand, a snake wrapped around his hands. Still terrified. But moving.
He didn't cure the phobia - he just stopped letting the name decide what happened next.
Maybe that's what getting through looks like: the fear still present, but no longer in charge.