I am tired of all the winter apologism I’ve heard since I returned to campus. Let me paint you a picture: I’ve just gotten off a three-hour flight from sunny, beautiful Florida. I traveled back to campus on dangerously unplowed roads under the care of an Uber driver who wouldn’t stop talking about Ron Paul and trudged through deep snow to get to my room. I stopped to catch my breath, only to be assaulted by sickly sentimental Snapchat stories about how gorgeous the snow is. “Ooh snow is so pretty #blessed” is 90 percent of my feed at any given time. Similar to how people forget ocean overfishing at a sushi buffet, people forget about the terror that is winter any time we get blanketed by nature’s Italian Ice.

No one enjoys winter, yet as a society we find reasons to pretend. Some people want to seem tough, so they go outside in 30-degree weather with shorts on and tell everyone that they’re a bunch of babies for wearing warm clothes since “it’s not even that cold.” It is this hyper masculine attitude that leads to some of humanity’s greatest mistakes, such as establishing human habitation in Moscow. There is no reason for people to live in a place like Moscow. Honestly, St. Louis is too cold for anyone to live in, but people like to seem so tough about the cold that they push themselves into forming these horrifying arctic cities.

People forget about all the small aggravations that snowball into the great pile of misery Jack Frost delivers to us. Wow, snow is so pretty; that is until its all grey-brown, melting into putrid slush piles to ruin your shoes and your life. “Oh 40 degrees isn’t so bad, it’s just the wind!” Listen, I do not care what the actual temperature is, if windchill makes it feel like -5 degrees outside, then it is cold. And honestly, is snow that gorgeous that it makes you forget about the pain, the brutal numbness in your nose and ears, the needling ache in your fingers? When I see snow, I don’t get happiness from its beauty. I don’t light up like some romantic poet who can hardly contain himself as he writes about snow as a transparent analogy for purity. No, I feel dread. I know that for the next several days I’ll get back to my room with wet socks, wind-burnt, eyes scorched from the blinding whiteness and close to death.

This attitude is emblematic of a greater problem in our society—the refusal to acknowledge and confront our issues. It’s an unhealthy position in life to deny your problems or minimize them rather than confronting their full magnitude. Stop denying the fact that winter sucks—it sucks. It’s awful. It’s the worst season. Neither our bodies nor our minds were designed to withstand the kind of suffering that is implicit in the month of January. Face the void, acknowledge that you aren’t special and that the cold affects you as much as everyone else. Get over yourself and be miserable like the rest of us.