You know how it goes: you grow up in Texas dreaming of big city life in New York—even though you’re from Houston, the fourth largest city in the country—and make plans for your move after college.

You get here, you live it up, and everything is fine and dandy until one day it’s just not so fine and dandy. Spring makes an appearance for five minutes and you think to yourself, “Well this is perfect: the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, the weather is ideal, everyone is blissful and happy.” So naturally, it’s not going to last.

Summer rolls in, kicking off stoop-peeing season, and four months of consistently wondering if skin rot occurs from excessive sweat; the reason all of your clothes smell just a little musty from May to August. You install your window unit since the technology of central air hasn’t made it this far north yet, and when you get the electricity bill for the month you make a rule that if anyone touches the window unit again, he or she is sentenced to death. You opt for an electric fan and spend the rest of your summer in a chair, right in front of it.

Then comes fall, and everyone starts talking about apples and pumpkins. There are orchards and fields all over the state, and because New York is full of ambitious people who do things, everyone goes out and takes pictures in them. Except for you.

Finally, winter arrives. The most heinous of them all. The first sub-thirty degree day hits and you think you can handle it, but once you’ve dealt with January and February, you begin to seriously question if you’ll know warmth again. Every day the sun fails to heat the earth above twenty degrees fahrenheit, it takes a bit of your soul with it when it dips back down into Hades.

All the while you wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, go to the gym, come home, eat dinner, fall asleep fully clothed with every light in your apartment turned on, wake up, turn everything off, fall back asleep, and begin the day anew. Over and over again. But it starts to get easier. You start to “make it.”

And the reason you start to “make it” is because you amass a group of friends—a very solid group. They congratulate you if something good happens. They picket for you if something bad happens. They reach out when you’re sad and ask if you’ve eaten something besides canned tuna for the day. They reach out generally and ask if you’ve eaten something besides canned tuna for the day. They take care of you. Slowly you realize that although you live and work on an island, you are not one, nor do you want to be.

Because these are also the people who didn’t judge you for that Leonardo DiCaprio desktop you installed on your work computer.