Caution: snakes ahead

I’ve always been terrified of snakes. The kind of terror that hits you to the core and leaves you shaken for hours. It all started one weeknight in Jacksonville. We had just moved there. I was a new mom in a new city. New coworkers but no real friends yet. No one to call if something went wrong.

Life was work, home, and back to work. That week my husband was out of the country. Just me and the baby. I pulled into the driveway and stopped the car. There was a large snake stretched across the entrance to the garage. Not moving. Just there, between me and the only way in. It was so long it nearly covered the full width of the two-car garage. I had heard about the reptiles in Florida. This was my first encounter.

I let out a scream and honked the horn. Startled my baby in the back seat. He started screaming. It was getting dark. I called my husband, on the other side of the world. No answer. I called animal protection services. They were unavailable, handling a gator situation. (You really can’t make this up.)

I honked some more. Still no movement. I wasn’t sure if it was dead and I was not getting out to check. I decided to drive away and come back. At least that would help the screaming baby in the back seat.

I came back a few hours later. It was gone. My neighbor was home by then. They looked around and confirmed it. I went through the front door instead of the garage. Told myself it was gone. Went to bed. A few days later my husband came back and he discovered it had burrowed under the front porch.

I had been walking past it every single morning. The thing I was most afraid of was right there the entire time. My caution had not protected me from anything.

That was over twenty years ago.

For a long time, without ever deciding to, I organized my life around not being in situations to encounter snakes. No walking in the woods.  Limited play in the backyard. I was definitely not the outdoorsy type.

I called it being careful. I called it knowing my limits. I called it caution.

It was an assumption. Built from one night. Carried for two decades.

You are making 2026 decisions from an old story.

From 2006. From the last restructuring. From the last time something like this happened and it went badly. From the season when you learned what happens when you move too fast or trust the wrong thing.

That lesson was real. That experience was real. But one hard moment is not a permanent truth about what you can handle.

Your past self survived something. That doesn’t mean your current self needs to keep paying for it.

I walk in the woods near my house most mornings now. The first time I saw a snake my body had the same reaction it did twenty years ago. I went back the next day anyway. And the next.

I still see snakes during my walks. My heart still skips. I keep walking.

Not because I stopped being afraid. Because I remind myself that I can do hard things.

And hard things become easy things eventually.

Think about one decision you are currently stalling on. Or one belief you are holding about what is possible for you right now.

Ask yourself: where is this actually from?

Not the logic you’ve built around it. The original moment. The first time you decided this was true about you. 

Is that moment still accurate? Is the situation actually the same? Are you the same person who lived through it?

If the answer to any of those is no, the assumption needs to be updated.

You are not that person alone in the driveway anymore.

You have more reps now. More evidence. More of yourself to bring.

Hard things become easy things eventually.

But only if you keep walking.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh