When I was thirteen, I did what I thought was the “very best girl” thing to do.

I became a cheerleader.

After making the middle school varsity squad, I wore the navy skirt and matching vest that read Newtown with an intense amount of pride. My white sneakers were always dusted with a Clorox wipe, and my glitter eyeliner applied right above my eyelashes as the older cheerleaders had instructed.

I strode down the halls, wearing a  hideous bow in my hair, smiling, because I was a cheerleader dammit! If thought bubbles surrounded me, they would have read adjectives like enthusiastic! proud! focused! and flirtatious! But none of them would have read “spirited,” or at least the type of “I’d defend this school to my grave” definition I longed for.

As a true optimist, I hoped things would change.  I was determined to find, or even create the type of devotion to a school that would make me feel unified. So in high school, I tried out again.  I told myself that things would be different this time.  I’d finally escaped middle school and was sure that the small international boarding school in Bucks County,  Pennsylvania I would be attending would somehow prompt a different kind of investment in being a supporter.

I kept up the ra-ra cheerleader act for the next four years with the most culturally diverse squad you’ve ever seen. (Really, I think we could have made record books). I did splits at games, and stunts during our halftime shows, thinking that if I kept smiling, and looking the part I could fool everyone, myself included, into believing that I had school spirit.

Flash-forward to this year, my sophomore year of college at The New School.  Walking down Fifth Avenue I pass acquaintances I’ve shared lectures and writing workshops with, but we don’t stop to say hello because this is New York City, and let’s face it, we’re not supposed to be the “warm and fuzzy” types.

I see the line of students chain-smoking cigarettes in front of the University Center, dressed in all black with artistic angst oozing from their pores as the squint at passers bys. They don’t greet me either. For a moment I feel upset because I realize that I miss the comfort of a phony smile from a somewhat stranger.  

But then I remember the Black Lives Matter sign projecting towards all the people of the city last year and something in me feels warm and safe, connected — maybe even spirited?

I think about the way my best friend lights up when she tells new acquaintances that she goes to The New School, and the way she combats the fear that the University’s name won’t be recognizable.  She is prepared to  answer the question we’ve all been asked a thousand times, “wait so it’s new?”

I think about the fall day when I came to tour The New School in clunky wedges and a seaweed-green top. As I followed my tour guide who rattled on about the BA/BFA program I looked around and I felt like that little girl from Kansas with the red slippers. At Hu Kitchen with my parents, I broke down. “If I don’t get in here I don’t know what I’ll do with my life,” I told them. (Quick shoutout to admissions:  without you, who knows where I would be.)

But seriously, on that first day I wasn’t bombarded with statistics about current students, or handed charts with SAT analysis. Instead, like the cool girl in class, The New School, with her students who had every zany shade of hair, and her history of social action just stood on fifth avenue and said, take me or leave me.

For the first time in six years, I am not a cheerleader. There are no cheerleading uniforms, or tailgates at The New School, and without them students  are still spirited. We are unified by the common denominators of the metropolis around us. Our unification, and our spirit is measured in different ways than the Kanye West song explains. (Sorry we don’t have greek life.)We’ve made our own rules, and as someone who has searched unknowingly for spirit, I believe what we have created is the authentic real-deal.