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

by Kate Fagan

As young people, we are trying to find our voice: trying out who we are, again and again, until something feels more accurate than the previous thing. Yet we rarely admit—or even recognize—that this is what we’re doing. On social media, few people confess that they’ve poured immense time and energy into what they post. We don’t confess this because we assume we’re the only ones who fret over such trivial things. Because nobody could possibly be as self-conscious as we are. We believe what we see. And we can’t be what we can’t see. We are so credulous when we assume that everyone else must be the version of themselves they portray in public, even if we are hardly the people we present ourselves as. We put time into our social media because we believe that it affords us the unique opportunity to fashion our own identity. We care about the images we post and the lines we write underneath those images, because it’s all part of reflecting who we are and constructing who we want to become. Would you put more time, or less, into a post if you knew it was your last? Would you want the image and words to be perfect, an ideal lasting representation of you, or would you quickly recognize the futility of the pursuit, that the whole thing was a mirage merely reflecting distorted images of the real world? And would you instead spend your time absorbing the world itself?