What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen

by Kate Fagan

How much do each of us sift out our struggles and pare away personal truths each day as we work to present a more perfect vision for critique by a social media–fueled world?

millions of other parents hadn’t yet considered how the Internet might be affecting their kids, how it was fostering an increased dependence on outside validation, and consequently a decreased ability to soothe themselves.

When Jim was growing up, good colleges were challenging to get into, but it wasn’t like it is today, when being a solid, diligent student is no longer enough. Students today must display excellence—not just competence—in numerous areas. The pressure to be great, not just good, is unrelenting. Believing that this pressure will simply disappear once kids arrive on campus seems like wishful thinking.

Track was supposed to be a complementary pursuit, to help with soccer. She was wildly talented as a runner, but something was missing. Eric had spent hours on the phone with her, mostly in her junior year, and during those calls he had noticed something: a shift in her voice when she talked about possibly running track in college. When she spoke of soccer, her voice was rich, humming with excitement. When she spoke of running, something clinical happened, all hard edges.

nothing turns enjoyment into dread faster than obligation.

The training was so different. In high school, she had been a middle distance runner. She had wanted to stretch to the mile at Penn, but cross-country included races four times that length. Also, when she ran races in high school, she usually won. There were only eight lanes, just seven opponents, but still, Madison routinely finished first. On the other hand, a college cross-country meet included hundreds of runners, all literally corralled at the starting line, released onto the course in a wave of humanity—dense lines of people jostling for running room, fighting to prove themselves with each stride. And each of these runners was just like Maddy: used to winning.

Maddy was addicted to progress, to the idea that her life would move in one vector—always forward, always improving—as opposed to the hills and valleys, the sideways and backward and upside down, that adults eventually learn to accept as more closely resembling reality. Maddy was not unique in feeling this way. Much of young adulthood is presented as a ladder, each rung closer to success, or whatever our society has defined as success. Perhaps climbing the ladder is tiring, but it is not confusing. You are never left wondering if you’ve made the wrong choice, or expended energy in the wrong direction, because there is only the one rung above you. Get good grades. Get better at your sport. Take the SAT. Do volunteer work. Apply to colleges. Choose a college. But then you get to college, and suddenly you’re out of rungs and that ladder has turned into a massive tree with hundreds of sprawling limbs, and progress is no longer a thing you can easily measure, because there are now thousands of paths to millions of destinations. And none are linear.

Everything had been flipped on its head, had become abstract. She was finishing behind a hundred other runners and was told that was good. She knew only half the answers on an art history test and was told not to panic.

Attending a meeting about mental health doesn’t carry the same social currency as going to a frat party and posting an awesome picture on Instagram. Others know they need help, commit to finding it, and get better.

It results in constant comparisons with our peers (which causes depression) and catastrophizing of any potential dent to our marketability (which results in anxiety). Essentially, it results in a dehumanized mindset.

On one hand, the job of parents is to make their child feel special and unique, as if they can do anything they put their mind to. After all, if our parents don’t believe in us, who will? But instilling those beliefs in a child is healthy only if balanced with a reality check about what the world is like, about how hard and difficult it can be, and about how few people will likely ascribe those same qualities of uniqueness and wonder to you. Somewhere along the way, we’ve started to believe that delivering this second message is cruel. But it’s not. Cruelty is offering either message—without the other.)

Kids used to grow up in the neighborhood—on the block or in the parks, playing games with other kids. These games had rules, but the kids themselves determined them, flexing their imaginations. Social scientists call these activities—capture the flag, bike races, pickup baseball games—“free play,” and it’s been steadily decreasing since the 1950s.

Developing competence at an activity that one enjoys, making friends, finding meaning in life, and pursuing a heartfelt religious path are examples of intrinsic goals. Getting high grades in school, making lots of money, achieving high status, and looking good to others are examples of extrinsic goals. Twenge argues convincingly that there has been a continual shift away from intrinsic toward extrinsic values in the culture at large and among young people in particular, promoted in part by the mass marketing of consumer goods through television and other media.

Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

One of the trickiest parts of social media is recognizing that everyone is doing the same thing you’re doing: presenting their best self. Everyone is now a brand, and all of digital life is a fashion magazine. While it’s easy to understand intrinsically that your presence on social media is only one small sliver of your full story, it’s more difficult to apply that logic to everyone else. Because you actually lived the full night, not just the two-second snapshot of everyone laughing, arms around shoulders. All you see of other people’s nights is an endless string of laughing snapshots, which your brain easily extrapolates to fantastic evenings filled with warmth and love, with good wine and delicious food. Comparing your everyday existence to someone else’s highlight reel is dangerous for both of you.

We’d rather sign on and feel some superficial sense of connection than work and possibly fail at true connection offline. Being in the real world can be uncomfortable, especially after you spend so much time online.

Before social media, we mostly interacted with one another in the bright light of day, where we all have so much less control over how we might look or seem. Now we spend hours a day consuming one another online. Moreover, digital natives have known only this reality. They have grown up on Instagram and Snapchat, absorbing hundreds of images a day. And most of these perfect pictures, loaded into boxes, reflect little of each person’s reality. We’re consuming an increasingly filtered world yet walking through our own realities unfiltered.

Young adults now predominantly communicate through text, or on Instagram and Snapchat. All of us, adults included, call people on the phone less frequently. Text is absolutely an efficient mode of staying in touch, because we can engage with numerous people while working—a steady stream of contact. And again, this may be fine when you’re feeling healthy and happy. But when you’re not, studies show that relying on these modes of digital communication does little to curb feelings of isolation and sadness.

How much of our happiness is fueled by society’s validation of our choices? It seems that the younger we are, the more dependent we are on making choices others will value and praise—perhaps because we haven’t developed, or don’t yet fully trust, our ability to name or even know what makes us happy.

Often, quitting is a mistake. So much is learned through perseverance. Nearly every college coach has been in this situation: sitting across from a student-athlete who no longer wants to compete. Occasionally this is precisely what that young person needs. But more often, if student-athletes push through the discomfort of the first year, they grow stronger, and later, those thoughts of quitting come to seem like the notions of someone else entirely. They end up being thankful to the coach who saw a different path, one that kept them steadily directed toward their goals. How does a coach know which athletes to let walk away and which ones to fight for? They don’t; they can’t. Not for sure, anyway. They just do their best.

depression and anxiety are not cured in a moment, with a single decision, though sometimes it can feel as if they might be. Even if Maddy had followed through on her decision to quit, other hard decisions would have followed. No matter how assiduously she had laid the groundwork for leaving, she hadn’t yet experienced what that would be like.

A never-ending struggle: watching your child fumbling, forging a path, becoming an adult, and not being sure when they need you to hug them and keep them safe, and when they need you to let them be.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. —Montesquieu

As young people, we are trying to find our voice: trying out who we are, again and again, until something feels more accurate than the previous thing. Yet we rarely admit—or even recognize—that this is what we’re doing. On social media, few people confess that they’ve poured immense time and energy into what they post. We don’t confess this because we assume we’re the only ones who fret over such trivial things. Because nobody could possibly be as self-conscious as we are. We believe what we see. And we can’t be what we can’t see.

Very little of what we say in text is a literal representation of how we feel, what we’re doing, how we’re behaving. It’s an animated, easy-to-digest version: an exaggeration or a simplification, but not a reflection. And that would be fine if it weren’t the main way we now communicate with one another. We believe we’re communicating with the humans we love and adore, and we are. But we aren’t absorbing their humanity.