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

by Kate Fagan

No one among them, parents included, cautioned that the transition to college might be unexpectedly difficult. Part of why no parent did so must have been because they simply could not imagine it would be. College had been different for their generation. For one thing, they grew up without the Internet, without video games, without social media. Madison and her friends were the first generation of “digital natives”—kids who’d never known anything but connectivity. That connection, at its most basic level, meant that instead of calling your parents once a week from the dorm hallway, you could call and text them all day long, even seeking their approval for your most mundane choices, like what to eat at the dining hall. Constant communication may seem reassuring, the closing of physical distance, but it quickly becomes inhibiting. Digital life, and social media at its most complex, is an interweaving of public and private personas, a blending and splintering of identities unlike anything other generations have experienced. 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.

During junior year, Maddy had spoken openly with Eric, describing how conflicted she felt about her college decision. If I get this opportunity with an Ivy, I think I have to take it, was how Maddy conveyed her thinking to Eric. “But if you don’t really want to do it, how can you be successful?” he responded.

But track in college was a different beast. For one, it was not just track; it was also cross-country. For another, it was not just one practice after school; it was also scheduled in the morning before classes. It was, like most Division I sports, a job—with time commitments, with demands, with expectations of performance. And nothing turns enjoyment into dread faster than obligation.

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.

The relatively early age—sometimes as early as elementary school—at which parents define children as athletes makes it more difficult to cultivate other parts of their identity. Very little else in our society is rewarded as athletics are. And when you’re young, the distinction between an activity that truly satisfies your soul and one that merely brings accolades is difficult to parse. For many, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. For others, sports are actually not their passion, a realization that doesn’t come until they’re put into the fire of college sports. But admitting ambivalence of this kind can feel like considering filing for divorce the day after a wedding: everyone involved has already invested so much time and money. And hadn’t you convinced yourself you were truly in love?

We have little sympathy for injuries that we can’t see and touch, for whatever is hurting that isn’t bloody or outwardly broken. But that’s where the comparison between the two ends, because with mental illness, unlike anemia, an official diagnosis usually doesn’t end the stigma. And to make matters worse, those with the least empathy are often teammates—peers.

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.)

Social media has psychological side effects. Paradoxically, hyperconnectivity may create feelings of disconnection—not only between us and others, but within ourselves. In Mind Change, clinical psychologist Larry Rosen points out that a “dangerous gap could grow between this idealized ‘front stage’ you and the real ‘backstage’ you, leading to a feeling of disconnection and isolation.” Social media doesn’t represent the first chance we’ve had to “distort” our identity, but it is the first that allows us to do so in such volume, and with such accessibility. Many celebrities have long felt the extreme disconnect between the public and private versions of themselves. Now the lived experience of a fractured persona, and the emotional impact of it, is being felt to varying degrees by millions of us.