Cheerleaders are people who quite literally lead us back to cheer. They are mirrors who show us our detrimental behaviors and attitudes, gently guiding us back into alignment with our truths, our integrity. Integrity comes from the Latin integer, which simply means being whole. Our unhappiness comes from living lives we think are right rather than lives that bring us joy, which leads to fractured living. Joy can be simple: buying fruit you’ve never tried, exploring a new building or dancing between study sessions. Instead of allowing ourselves these small joys (many of them free!), we smother our true selves with the mechanistic monotony of work and equate the effort we put in with our probability of success. We fool ourselves into thinking success is happiness and that we can muscle through our suffering until graduation. 

We need cheerleaders to remind us of our right to live joyful lives when we experience the negative emotions brought on from splintered living. Splintered living can look different for everybody: studying something you hate, dating someone you don’t like, watching something that bores you. Giving time to friends, partners, classes and projects when all you want to do is focus on fulfilling hobbies is splintered living. I’m not suggesting that we drop out and build a cabin in the woods (after all, I’m studying engineering just like the rest of you); I’m suggesting we find small daily moments to live joyfully, so that the child inside of us agrees to sit down and do differential equations because she’s already had her fun writing poetry, painting or singing. You may be wondering what the point of living a joyful life is if it does not focus on developing your success; I hear you. But let me remind you (as I often remind myself) that success is external, and dependent upon factors beyond our control. Joy is internal, and only dependent on your mindset. Fascinatingly enough, I have found that even the most difficult tasks (i.e., engineering classes) come to me with much more ease after I have appeased my inner artist, but I often forget to do so without the aid of my cheerleaders. 

I have multiple cheerleaders, each reflecting different layers of my life back to me through their experiences, like kaleidoscopes. Some are fictitious characters, and some are close friends. Some have passed centuries ago, and some have passed recently. I’m sure you’re wondering how to find your own cheerleaders. Allow me to reacquaint you with serendipity: two unrelated events with a related significance, like a “coincidence.” I have had many of these experiences in my life: sitting next to my future best friend in CALC 151, hearing my mother’s words through one of my favorite professors, and chatting with a fellow artist by accident over Zoom. When you experience your serendipitous moments, write them down. In realizing and remembering these moments, we begin leading ourselves back to cheer, giving us the gift of seeing the world with new eyes.