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

by Kate Fagan

Jim and Stacy, Susie and Kobus, and 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. In 2013, these were just beginning to register as increasing concerns.

nothing turns enjoyment into dread faster than obligation.

meant walking onto a grass field, cleats in hand, laughing with friends she’d known her entire life. The work was hard, but it was collective work, with friends to connect with between sprints with a nod (“We got this”), or a laugh (“Coach is crazy”), or an exhausted grimace (“How many more?”)—each person pulling weight toward a larger goal. Now, late summer and fall meant waking up at dawn in a cramped dormitory room, in a new city, to trudge to practice and run long distances, the person next to you living inside her own head, considering her own times, responsible only for her own motivation. Maddy didn’t have anyone she wanted to show up for.

Penn finished seventeenth as a team, and Maddy came in 104th out of more than 400 runners. That day, she was Penn’s second-fastest runner, despite being the only one who hadn’t run cross-country in high school.

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.

Comparing your everyday existence to someone else’s highlight reel is dangerous for both of you.

“There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet,” she writes. “And there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it—no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them. No, 2016 is not the worst year ever, but it’s the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”

Consider this passage from Mind Change: “Teenagers who spoke with their parents over the phone or in person released similar amounts of oxytocin [an indication of bonding and well-being] and showed similar low levels of cortisol [a marker of stress], indicative of a reduction in stress. In comparison, those who instant-messaged their parents released no oxytocin and had salivary cortisol levels as high as those who did not interact with their parents at all. Thus 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.”

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.

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.