I like winter, cold hard winters.

I like winter, cold hard winters.

I like winter, cold hard winters.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always liked the story of the Snow Queen. I think that part of being human is aging gracefully, and I can’t wait until I’m old and able to have my hair all white like Elsa. It may sound dumb, but genuinely that’s what I like. My first Halloween costume ever was also about the Snow Queen. I remember wearing a short white wig, and at my school the older students were bullying me about it because they were saying I looked like Lady Gaga. I still remember how I was walking shy through those halls and they were mockingly singing “Poker Face.” I hate bullies, there’s nothing on earth that I hate more than a bully. And nothing brings me greater satisfaction than when a bully loses their power. It’s just poetic and it feels almost divine.

Ever since I was a kid, I always liked the story of the Snow Queen. Not Elsa. The real one. The Hans Christian Andersen one, where she’s not trying to be understood and she’s not looking for redemption and she doesn’t have an arc where she learns to love again. She’s just cold. Powerful. Completely at home in conditions that would destroy everyone else. But it’s her home, and she likes it. No one but her has to like it. I never understood why I was supposed to be scared of her. She lives alone in a palace made entirely of ice. She is precise, vast, and completely unbothered. She doesn’t ask to be loved. She doesn’t soften herself for anyone. She moves through the world like weather: indifferent, inevitable, and stunning in a way that hurts to look at directly. We’re supposed to read her as the villain. But I’ve always thought that was the part of the story that aged the worst.

I think about the women I know who run cold, my own mother among them. Not cruel, cold. The ones who don’t cry in public, who make decisions without flinching, who are perfectly fine alone in January when everyone else is desperately seeking someone to keep them warm. Society has a hundred words for them. Distant. Intimidating. A lot. I was raised by cold women, I think that’s maybe why I turned out to be like them, although I do believe they are emotional in their own way. Meanwhile, the person who needs constant warmth, constant reassurance, constant sunlight just to function, that’s the one we call healthy.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being told I should want the summer version of things. Soft, warm, easy. And maybe some people are built for that. Good for them, genuinely. My husband loves Florida and I hate it, I cannot stand, for the love of God, the sun, and that’s okay because everybody is different and I’m allowed and entitled to hate the sun and the warm weather.

But some of us are the Snow Queen. We were made for difficult conditions. We do our best work in the cold. We don’t need the thaw, we are the architecture that holds up when everything freezes.

The palace isn’t the prison. It’s just home.

I wasn’t made for sunshine and warmth. I was made for cold hard winters, the ones where your true strength is tested. Like the jungle, it’s the law of the strongest out there, who is the biggest predator.