Junior Olivia Rothwell is an infectious lover. Her goal is to let her happiness exude onto others and be a reliable helper for everyone around her. As an optimistic, cheery girl, she also went through trials when her grandfather passed away and had to learn when to be joyful and when to mourn.
“Why I’m such a happy person is I think it’s mainly about the positivity I want to give to people around me who I love. I don’t know how I get it, but I like whenever there’s a hard situation and my friends are like, ‘This sucks. I don’t know where to go from here.’ That’s when I like to ask them if they want to go out and do something and cheer them up. I want them to know that we can go through this together. I like to gain my positivity through good energy from my friends and through surrounding myself with positive people and positive things that I like to do that I will put my all in. Even if it’s not my favorite thing, I want to put my all into it. Right now, I like writing and that’s what makes me happy. Sharing it with other people who share my interests is something I’ve never done before until this year. I’m taking Creative Writing and gaining a lot of positive feedback that I never knew I had before through that. That’s giving me a lot of happiness right now. There was a hard time recently with my family when my grandpa died. It was really hard for all of us because we were pretty tight. It was a situation where I’ve actually never lost a family member before so I didn’t know how to deal with that at first. I’m an optimistic person so I was very happy about it and I was like, ‘We’re good. We’ll get through it.’ Then I went to the funeral and everyone was crying and I realized that there are some things that take time. I let myself grieve and I realized there’s not a perfect way to get through this. There’s not a way to look about it in a good way, because there weren’t many good things to it in reality. Pretty much the only thing I could do was be there for my grandma and family members. Through that, that’s how we all got through it and it took time and it wasn’t perfect or looking on the bright side. It was more about sharing love with each other and sharing appreciation with each other. That is how we got through that time.”