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

by Kate Fagan

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.

Our culture celebrates harder, faster, stronger. Vulnerability, it would seem, undermines that pursuit.

Living with a ghost is frightening enough, but if you change houses to escape it and the ghost is present in the new space, then you’ve confirmed that it’s not the house the ghost is haunting. It’s you.

According to the American College Health Association, the suicide rate among fifteen-to twenty-four-year-olds has tripled since the 1950s. An annual survey of college freshmen found that 30 percent reported feeling overwhelmed, with that number rising to 40.5 percent among women. This is the highest percentage registered since the survey started in 1985, at which point the numbers were approximately half what they are now. One study found that an average high school student today likely deals with as much anxiety as did a psychiatric patient in the 1950s.

And here’s a particularly problematic statistic: according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, while 7 percent of parents reported their college students experiencing mental health issues, fully 50 percent of students rated their mental health below average or poor. In other words, even those closest to college kids often have no clue how they’re really feeling. The data, the papers, the surveys—they go on for hundreds of pages. And they all point to the same conclusion: a serious mental health issue exists on our college campuses.

Social scientists call these activities—capture the flag, bike races, pickup baseball games—“free play,” and it’s been steadily decreasing since the 1950s. Scientists have also noted a correlation between the decreasing amount of childhood free play—any play not directed by adults—and the increasing rates of anxiety and depression among kids. As free play decreases, anxiety increases.

Deresiewicz writes: Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities. This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. 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.

We have this idea that someone’s phone will reveal their life, that if you found an iPhone on the street you’d have access to photos, e-mail, notes, texts, videos, apps. Each of these would project an angle of light that would gradually illuminate a whole person. But the truth is nothing like that. The truth is that a phone will help you build something like a hologram, and if you tried to touch it, your hand would breeze right through the image.

I became desperate for everyday moments, which felt exotic.

“Notice how close perfection is to despair.”

Then Boyd turns to the weavers who create the world’s most beautiful rugs. They spend hours creating designs by hand, and during this painstaking process the shapes and angles often become lopsided, asymmetrical. However, this asymmetry is not considered a mistake to be eradicated or smoothed out. In fact, it is the opposite: this imperfection becomes the rug’s beauty, its uniqueness. This rug is unlike any other, and that is what makes it a coveted work. Boyd’s message asks a single question of his listeners: In which way do we view imperfection?

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

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.

The best part of life is often the way we anticipate what is to come. For a trip, for the weekend, for a party, for so many moments that are happening after and apart from the ones we are currently living. Sometimes we also believe that another place will change us, or at least how we feel, and that it will be a change for the better. And even if we recognize, when we get to this time or place, that it has not changed us, that we are still just ourselves, we cannot help but fall for this trick the next time, and again and again afterward. We fall for it because it soothes us during all the moments we aren’t doing exactly the thing we wish we could be doing, and because it allows us the transcendent emotion of anticipation. 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.

Social media is a form of offense and defense: we consume, we absorb, and we decide what to consume and absorb based on what we’ve consumed and absorbed.

Nothing is decided until it is.

Dese’Rae: Right. It’s an abusive relationship; it’s trauma; it’s years of depression. It’s a breakup with someone who is manipulative, someone who I could not get away from and didn’t really want to. So that’s the interesting part to me, because I want to dig into why people make decisions. That’s the interesting part—it’s about reframing the suicide story to be about the person’s life, not just about their death.

A definitive story is needed for those of us left behind, so we can feel better. Amid chaos, order and understanding feel paramount. We feel we must find a reason for why she jumped—a reason that makes sense to a healthy mind. But there is no one thing. There are rivers that merge and create a powerful current. And we can’t fully know why they all merged, right then, right there, around Maddy. Still, we can try to analyze each one, the way it bends and curves, what it turns into when it blends with another. We can do this, learn everything we can, how to talk to others about their pain or our own, in the hope that fewer people get caught in this same, fierce swirl.