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

by Kate Fagan

Many of us are Maddy, but for the grace of a few decisions or moments of support that placed us on a different path, to a different outcome.

Anxiety for me feels paralyzing. Horrible word to use, I know, but it’s the truth. I’m scared to do pretty much everything. It’s like these flurries of irrational thoughts that I know are irrational, but my mind just has them anyway and I can’t help but give in to the feeling. Sometimes, I manage it

and I go and it’s fine. But when it’s really bad, I hide.

Because I don’t know. Everyone wants to feel loved, and everyone wants to feel good at something. But, like, that doesn’t make anything go away. I guess what helps is consciously fighting against my own brain. Learning my own brain. Honest conversations.

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.”

kids, how it was fostering an increased dependence on outside validation, and consequently a decreased ability to soothe themselves.

daughter. The room is bare, a twin bed on each side, a sallow

People liked to be around her because she always seemed to be laughing. And when she wasn’t, she made sure she was around friends who could empathize, who understood the anxiety that accompanied ambition.

tangential.

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,

adults eventually learn to accept as more closely resembling reality.

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 ...

college. But then you get to college, and suddenly you’r...

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.

We have little sympathy for injuries that we can’t see and touch, for whatever is hurting that isn’t bloody or outwardly broken.

only years later did I come to see that just because a situation was right for me didn’t mean that it was right for everyone, and sometimes making a life change is fundamentally necessary for another person.

Recognize that empathy might be in short supply. Educate yourself about mental health. And consider the idea that not every struggling teammate is weak.

the campus population. According to pretty much every study conducted over the past five years, levels of empathy among college-age students is plummeting. The University of Michigan conducted a study in 2014 that found that college kids are 40 percent less empathetic than they were just twenty years before.

“The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline.

Add in the hypercompetitive atmosphere and inflated expectations of success, born of celebrity ‘reality shows,’ and you have a social environ...

listening to someone who needs a bit ...

On some level, I think I understood that even though I felt I was failing at one identity—athlete—she saw my value on other levels and would recognize that I was more than someone who just

And I needed her to validate my other

layers of self-worth, the kind independent of basketball, because I...

hurts (and what kind of hurt is bad enough?), but because

The toughest work—the development of skill through thousands of hours of practice—has already been completed. Now it’s payoff time, an opportunity to be celebrated

There is such a push for perfection that normal life skills (learning time management, healthy sleep habits, adult responsibilities) are not in place. Substance abuse and other methods

What I learned about myself and about my peers was that our main source of stress was that we were simply not allowed to be human…

of stress was that we were simply not allowed to be human… My generation is not suffering because we didn’t learn how to lose a game of flag football. We’re suffering because everything we do is filtered through a lens of consumerism. We see ourselves as “products” to be “branded” and “marketed” in all venues of our lives: social, romantic, and professional.

EVERYTHING we do is seen as instrumental towards marketing ourselves for the college admission boards, or for the job market, or to help us rush a fraternity or sorority, or to help us win friends, or to help us be a more attractive potential partner. You see the capitalist worldview has infiltrated

You see 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

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 micro-managing every aspect of our lives to best effect so that it looks good for Facebook or LinkedIn or Tinder. It results in constant compariso...

what we really want to do. It results in micro-managing every aspect of our lives to best effect so that it looks good for Facebook or LinkedIn or Tinder. It results in constant comparisons with our peers (which causes depression) and catastrophizing of any potential dent to our marketability...

dent to our marketability (which results in anxiety). Essentially, it results i...

In 2014, Penn commissioned a task force to assess the climate on campus and how this climate might affect students. The eight-page report used the term “destructive perfectionism” and observed that “the drive for academic excellence along with the perception that in order to be successful one needs

think Penn students coined the phrase “Penn Face” to represent how everyone gives off a certain image of being okay, and having everything together,

and almost, like, say, even though I’m stressed, I still have time to have a perfect social life, perfect grades, to join all these clubs, and I’m super successful. But in reality people are stressed, and do feel alone, and it’s important to address those things.

(Here, Devanshi is cutting to the core of something specific. 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?

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.)

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 c...

It’s like, if you have a sprained ankle, you can say that you have one and people say, “Yeah, that makes sense why you’re in pain right now.” But if you say you’re depressed, nobody really wants to talk about that, or bel...

And it’s a very preprofessional school. You’re put into this environment where people don’t just have their major figured out, but supposedly have their life figured out—even the next ten years planned out. So if you don’t, it’s

like, “Well, what am I even doing?”

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.

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. She refers also to evidence that the pursuit of extrinsic goals at the expense of intrinsic goals correlates with anxiety and depression. It seems reasonable that this would be true.

Gray later writes: “Humans are extraordinarily adaptive to changes in their living conditions, but not infinitely so.” Now add in social media. Is there anything you have less control over than how many likes you receive on a photo? As scholar William Deresiewicz has written, we h...

We’re teaching young people what to think, but not how to think. 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.

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 n...

one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.