Staff Column: How I stopped living in borrowed seasons

By Staff Writer Kayla Li

Warmth. A gentleness earned after long seasons of cold, a glow familiar yet startling in its clarity. We meet it as a tender ease of being alive, and without thinking, we are drawn to call it warmth. To each person comes their own season. Some bloom easily, carrying spring wherever they go. Others stand at the edge of another’s sunlight, believing that proximity is the same as belonging. For a long time, I mistook that light for my own. 

I did not arrive at that belief alone. I grew up in stories and friendships where harmony was praised, where devotion meant giving everything and asking for nothing. When I was three, I watched the Little Mermaid leave behind the bright, foaming warmth of her sea and stepped onto a colder shore, surrendering her voice as though silence were simply another season to endure. And so I learned, before I understood it, that love meant leaving one’s own climate behind, that to walk toward another’s sun sometimes required abandoning the waters that once held you. It became easy to believe that another person’s happiness could sustain me better than anything I found within myself. Love, as I understood it then, required diminishing: shrinking so others might expand, yielding space so their brightness could stretch unhindered. If they were warm, I believed I would not feel the cold. 

Over time, this hardened into habit. Caring meant making myself smaller. I became the one who offered comfort without asking where my own reserves would come from, the one who mirrored delight and absorbed disappointment. I had absorbed a particular kind of wisdom, one that felt unquestionable: the important thing was to love rather than to be loved. 

And so, I lived through borrowed seasons. I admired spring from just behind another’s shoulder, mistook usefulness for belonging in autumn, called steadfastness warmth in winter. Every season I experienced was contingent, secondhand, self-sacrificial. They passed through me without taking root.

Borrowed warmth fades.

I began noticing it in small ways. I would celebrate a friend’s success and feel only the echo of applause inside my own chest. I would offer comfort and walk away strangely emptied, as though something essential had been drawn out and not returned. 

Then winter came. Not theirs, but mine. I stepped back, just slightly, and the air changed. I did not answer their calls immediately, nor did I say yes to every request. In that small refusal to overextend, the reflected light thinned. Without the steady exchange of comfort and validation, I stood beneath a sky that no longer borrowed warmth from elsewhere. For the first time, I felt the cold of having no happiness that belonged to me.

Winter, in its severity, is honest. In that unadorned light, I saw what I avoided: I had no spring cultivated by my own longing, no summer ripened by my own joy. I began to understand that love and happiness are not finite resources to be rationed between people, that shrinking myself was never the cost of loving well. The conviction I carried — that “the important thing was to love rather than to be loved” — was not a universal truth but a story I had been fed. The heart cannot subsist on what it reflects; it requires what it makes.

Perhaps this is why something now feels different. As we get older, we look back at childhood heroines who surrendered their voices and no longer call their silence strength. I notice it in Reels and TikToks where people joke about being the “therapist friend,” always ready for someone else. There are more conversations now about self-worth and emotional independence, about holding your own warmth as stability rather than selfishness. We are beginning to question the idea that love must require departure from one’s own sea, that one can live an entire year in someone else’s spring and still expect their own roots to deepen.

Even winter contains the promise of change. I stopped rearranging my plans to match everyone else’s. I let myself stay home without inventing an excuse. I allowed silence to remain unfilled. I gave myself permission to refuse without guilt and to let my own happiness exist without shrinking. Slowly, internal warmth returned like early thaw, like the slow reappearance of color after a long gray season. It was a warmth that did not depend upon another’s light.

And then, almost imperceptibly, winter met spring at the delicate seam where frost softens and green presses upward despite the cold. I had once believed that if someone else shone brightly, it justified my own dimming. Slowly, I came to see how wrong that was. I noticed that celebrating others no longer left me hollow. Happiness was not a competition for warmth. Two lights may share the same sky without consuming the other.

The shift was simply moving from “your happiness is enough for me” to “because I have my own warmth, I can celebrate yours fully.” Now, when I rejoice with a friend, I do not disappear into their happiness. When I offer comfort, it comes from reserves I have learned to replenish. The warmth I carry endures because it is rooted. 

My brightest season was not the spring I once waited for. It was the winter in which I learned to carry warmth myself — the winter I understood that warmth does not descend upon us fully formed, but grows slowly from ground we choose to tend. 

And in that growth, steady and unspectacular, the heart remembers what it once set aside: how to be alive not as reflection, but as source; how to call warmth by its truest name, familiar yet startling in its clarity, a gentleness earned after long seasons of cold.