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

by Kate Fagan

they didn’t want Maddy’s death to be an isolated tragedy, but rather a catalyst for change.

many of their daughter’s friends were having trouble with the transition to college, exacerbated because most were playing sports and overwhelmed with the time commitment. The truth was, none of the parents had any idea what to say or do—for their own kids, let alone for someone else’s.

would describe it as really lonely, but not wanting to be alone, but feeling like you have to be in this life alone because dragging anyone else down with you, especially people you love, is even more selfish than the thoughts I already have and things I already did.

And the big one: How honest should I really be?

I don’t get there and I’m a perfectionist, a destructive perfectionist like Madison. Just like Madison.

My therapist tells me, “You HAVE to remember, you will always have a distorted view of the world. Your eyes are skewed. You have a depressed lens. An anxious lens. A perfectionist lens.”

No one among them, parents included, cautioned that the transition to college might be unexpectedly difficult.

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.

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.

Knowing the difference between a hurdle and a brick wall is also crucial—yet recognizing that difference is almost impossible when you’re eighteen years old.

the capitalist worldview has infiltrated our psychology, and our sense of self-worth. And it is toxic. It results in fear of being ourselves and following what we really want to do.

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.

It’s easier to feel connected online than to truly connect in real life. So plugging in becomes addicting. 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.

When you’re anxious and low, and out of habit (and addiction) you launch social media, it is unlikely that images of others will help you feel connected. Rather, they almost certainly further pry apart the space between you and everyone else, because you are not happy and everyone else seems to be.

Efficient communication does not mean effective communication.

while the younger generation may favor non-oral modes of communication, when it comes to providing emotional support, messaging appears comparable to not speaking with anyone at all.”

The either/or thinking that permeates sports makes stepping aside, during a drill or a season, a referendum on character, on its deficiencies.

How much of our happiness is fueled by society’s validation of our choices?

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

Anticipation allows us to be in two different moments at once. But it is often a zero-sum game: we steal from one to fuel the other.

Anticipation fuels optimism, at least temporarily. We tell ourselves that the current moment will not last forever, that the next moment will deliver us somewhere better. Of course, if that promise is repeatedly broken, if those next moments are never better, a kind of melancholy can set in: both our present and future seem tarnished.

A world exists in our phone, which we can retreat to—an escape that might offer us something more pleasant, or at least a distraction from our momentary boredom at being a human who is alive in the world, and therefore dealing with all the things that come with that.

concept that photographs, though seemingly unbiased, are often manipulated as much as, if not more than, words.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

the students mined how they felt about social media, and they kept striking on a similar concept: obligation. So many of these college freshmen felt a moral obligation to project a certain kind of happiness. They could not, as one student put it, “in good conscience” disseminate sadness and unhappiness into the world.

“I’m still confused about that bag of gifts,” Jim said later. “I mean, the time and the effort that it appears she put into it, that maybe she planned this and to go ahead and, in her greatest time of need, still be thinking of others. It’s just, it’s unbelievable.”

you can only spot the after if you’ve known the before.