The Cheerleader Ambush of a College Freshman
- linnieaikensartist
- Apr 15
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 16
I felt it the minute I walked onto the campus of Westmont College. That was the day I was reborn. Oh, I don’t mean spiritually; we don’t want to open that can of worms yet; but definitely emotionally. On that morning, the early Autumn breeze, coming up the mountain from the ocean, was liberating in more ways than even I suspected at that moment. I was hopeful in discovering what this new beginning would bring. I closed my eyes, smiled, and tilted my face to the sunshine. Freedom. Peace at last.
“You sure look peaceful there, soaking up the sunshine.” The friendly voice came from behind me. I opened my eyes and turned my face to him shyly. He was sitting in a beat-up pickup in front of the old estate home, turned administration building, maybe a landscaper by the looks of the rakes and mower in the truck bed. His tousled strawberry blonde hair gave him sort of a rumpled, but endearing shaggy dog look. In the late 70’s, he had what we called a ‘bed head’ and in the mid-60’s, a ‘Dennis the Menace hairdo’. “You a freshman?” he smiled. My legs buckled slightly, even sitting on the grass as I was, with the impact of that smile aimed at me. No boy had ever smiled at me like that before.
I imagined he already knew the answer to that. It was a small college, after all. “Yes,” in a small voice. I smiled, glanced at the ground then back up at him from under my curls and nodded.
“Well, if you ever need help finding your way, I’m around; be sure to ask, okay?” Oh. He’s just a campus worker being nice. I’m such a dork! I nodded, a little embarrassed. Little did either of us know then that we would turn out to be close friends for over four decades…lifetime friends and kindred spirits in the end.
As I sat observing from my quiet patch of grass on Kerrwood Lawn, I reflected in wonder upon how people who didn’t know one another actually talked to each other here. In Los Angeles, and on the border of Hollywood, where I grew up, my mother’s general rule to us girls was to “walk with a purpose,” and don’t make eye contact with anyone. That was the only way to be safe, according to my mother. Of course, those were different days and certainly a different area. I mean with the Hillside Strangler on the loose in our area, and Charles Manson killing a couple around the corner from where I went to school in Silverlake, it made sense for her to be hyper-careful. In any event, following her rule had suited me fine, since I never knew what to say to anyone anyway and was careful not to let anyone too close. Still, this new prospect of a different way to live was an intriguing one.
It started with a deep cleansing breath. I was finally on my own, away from….all that…..I was in college! Here I was going to start fresh, where no one knew me. I worked as hard as possible, pushing myself to the limit in every way, working full time to pay for my college, carrying 18-22 units, running four or five miles every day on those hilly roads weaving through the mansions, doing all-nighters studying night after night, taking No-Doze to stay awake, and throwing up my food. I was determined to take control of my life. Good grief, was I a hot mess, or what?
I had dozens of friends for the first time, friendships that both elated and scared me, an introvert who'd steadily fortified her walls all the way through high school. I had so desperately wanted people to like me and see me as worthy of respect and admiration, that I would do anything to win their smiles and hold at bay that ever-nagging, niggling self-doubt. I’d push it down and ignored it, not even admitting it to myself for several decades later when I finally got some help to sort through my past and do business with the pain I sought so hard to ignore during these years. During college, however, I didn’t actually acknowledge any of this was lurking underneath, nor did I consider any of the underlying motivations of my behavior and unspoken mantra that no one and nothing was going to ruin my new life.
I remember that first week of school, after living there for four or five days and discovering that out of 24 girls in Section A of Page Hall, 23 of them had either been a cheerleader and/or Prom Queen or Princess, and/or Homecoming Queen for their high school. My first thought was that I'd hoped I'd left this behind me in high school—the invisible best friend to a head cheerleader and a Prom and Homecoming Queen, as much as I loved them dearly. My second thought was that “they” had made a mistake in housing me with this bunch. My third was that this must be some sort of sick psychology experiment of a bored housing director. I made sure that my first on-campus job was in the Housing Office so that I could find out for myself what kind of masterminds were behind such a potentially lethal grouping. In my mind, it had the 1976 horror movie, “Carrie,” written all over it.
Thinking back on that time, I find myself chuckling now to think that the mastermind was a genius woman who had later become the president of one of the largest health insurance companies in the U.S., a woman for whom I had the utmost respect. I still remember how we'd laughed about her social experiment, when I finally made her come clean. She'd placed her own cheerleader younger sister in that same section of girls with me, so I now wonder if she'd had some of the same deeply seeded inferiority issues I'd had at the time and felt they all deserved to live together so as not to minimize the rest of us. Now days, cheerleaders come in all shapes and sizes, but back then, they were definitely considered the paragons of beauty and the sirens of the teenage years.
And here begins my tale...
Within the first month of college, I think all of the girls in my section of our college dorm for some odd reason took pity on me, is all I can surmise, for although they were all incredibly warm and nice to me, for I was conspicuously not one of them. Pegging me as a painfully shy, inexperienced gypsy-hippie-dippy girl who loved candles, they decided that I was going to try out for cheerleading.
I was sitting on my bed in my dorm room studying one evening, when a delegate, no other way to put it, marched into my room and announced that I was going to try out for cheerleading. My jaw dropped. I gaped speechlessly, as I took in the panorama of real-life Barbie Dolls positioned in front of me, chipper voices, perky noses, and sparkly eyes, with hips and heads cocked in their practiced and now unconsciously provocative stances. I marveled, in those few silent moments, at their skill and wondered how long it must have taken for them to perfect that stance into something as unconscious as breathing. My very next thought was that they were out of their gourds!
“You have GOT to be kidding! Me? A CHEERLEADER?” There was no way in this lifetime, or any other, that I was going to ‘rah rah’ in some archaic display in front of a bunch of people and make a spectacle of myself. Absolutely not!
“Yes. We’ve all decided, Linnie. You shouldn’t be hiding your light under a bushel. It’s time to let your light shine!” Sherry, the perkiest of the bunch announced in her confident “I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” smile. I thought, you are kidding, right? And what’s with the “this little light of mine” analogy? I might as well have stuck out my lower lip in a pout. And yet, deep within, there was that tiny voice of almost extinguished hope that wanted to be seen as pretty, as the beautiful princess, the worthy, adored girl that they all were, not the shameful, ugly, invisible nobody that I saw myself as.
So I became the dorm project. Every night a group of girls would teach me the routines and make me practice. I was awkward at the rah rahhing, terrified, and shy…but I was coordinated and a gymnast, which turned out to be my saving (or unfortunate) grace. On the night of tryouts, my entire dorm of guys and gals showed up and sat together to cheer me on. That was 144 people! To this day, I am sure the only reasons I was chosen to be a cheerleader were due to the facts that the judges were so impressed that I could garner so much support and the fact that I was a gymnast; I was small, had great balance, and I could stand on top of a human pyramid.
At that time however, all I could think about was how to balance the elation of my new status with the unmitigated fear that somehow they would eventually find out the truth. They would discover what an ugly person I really was. I worried that they would regret the time they had spent on me, then withdraw their love and attention. In their unknowing eyes, I was their shy “sweetheart,” and I hated myself even more for living that lie. Still, I loved pleasing them and making them happy, so I worked as hard as possible at pleasing them. It was a survival skill that kept me sane perhaps.
40 years later, I cannot deny my responsibility for my behavior, trauma coping skill or not. I have learned in 60+ years that I had built coping skill on top of coping skill my entire life in order to not only survive but succeed in other areas of my life. Thriving would come later. Much later.
I have also realized something else too, as a gray-haired lady, looking back on this experience. Despite all, I was brave even in the face of fear, an attribute I wouldn’t recognize about myself until I was able to notice it as a typical behavior. The times when I grabbed hold of fear, “did it anyway” and conquered it, the rewards rained down like manna from heaven, not just extrinsically, but intrinsically—inside where it really counts. I learned to trust myself and accept myself just a tiny bit more each time I did it .
These are the kinds of Aha’s that I wish I’d known in “real time,” that I might have had an easier time of it, emotionally, but then, isn’t life like that? We must go through such experiences more than a few times sometimes to be able to recognize the learning in it—another Aha that I would have appreciated knowing then.
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