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Kendall Brown's Reviews > What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen
What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen
by
by
Would this story have been written if Maddy was not a beautiful, Ivy league athlete? Absolutely not. But I, too, fell into the trap of “but she was so pretty� - as if being good looking makes you immune to the difficulties of life.
I see a lot of myself in Maddy. I have never handled failure well. School made sense to me. I have always equated my self worth to an external marker, first grades, now salary. To me, self worth depended on success. I am just now realizing that self esteem may fluctuate but self worth is steady - a deep knowing that you are enough. Right now this concept is abstract but I’m working towards a base level of self regard, that does not rely on external success factors.
Maddy was a freshman at Penn on the track team who killed herself in January 2014 (eerily on my birthday...) I don’t remember her but I probably read a headline about her back then. This book has softened my stance on athletes and mental health - or more broadly fame/pressure and mental health. I used to think that it was complete bullshit that Simone Biles dropped out of the most recent Olympics due to “mental health.� I did not see this as a heroic act in the slightest. I saw it as a cop out because she wasn’t doing as well as she wanted. But I found it hypocritical because she had been ALL over tv cashing in on the upcoming Olympics. She was in soooo many ads. So I was very annoyed when she dropped out. She should have to give all that endorsement money back! What a fraud! Same with Naomi Osaka, the tennis star. Same with Jonah Hill - you can’t just opt out of doing PR - that’s part of your job!
But after listening to the first chunk of this book, I have a lot more empathy. First, I had forgotten how unbelievably disorienting and stressful freshman year of college was. I had a really hard time. I have repressed these memories and reframed college as a magical time. But it certainly was not. I stopped sleeping. I stopped going to the bathroom (I will never forgive Cal for its co-ed bathrooms - HORRIBLE). I had no idea how to feed myself. I discovered pretzel goldfish in the Unit 3 grab and go section of the cafeteria. I felt like a complete fraud and failure. I didn’t get into the “right� sorority. I didn’t know what to major in. I didn't get straight A's. It was brutal. The pressure was relentless. And at the same time, I wasn’t under any pressure but I felt like I was drowning. After working so hard in high school to get to college, I felt completely bereft. I had no map to follow. Life had been so prescribed - take AP classes, play sports, do extra curricular - all to get into the best college you can to eventually get the best job you can. But how were those four years supposed to go? Well I was “supposed� to apply to the business school but I was too intimidated. Everyone at Cal was so self assured. My roommate was a double major (she ended up not graduating with either of those majors but at the time I felt like I was supposed to know what to do). I am still perplexed by those who came in as declared engineering majors. What is engineering? I still don’t know. How did they know they wanted to be engineers??? A friend of mine tried to transfer into engineering and didn’t get in. So really you have to know before you even apply. So at age 17 you must know that you want to be an engineer. But there are no engineering classes in high school. Someone please make it make sense! It has to be that their parents were engineers. So if you’re parents aren’t engineers, you will never be one. Another friend came in declared as an EECS major - electrical engineering and computer science - what is electrical engineering!?
I made one friend that wasn’t in my sorority freshman year. She had dropped out of sorority rush because she hated it. She left Cal after freshman year and transferred to UC Irvine to be near home. She told me how much she hated Cal and I tried to encourage her to join a sorority because that had been the only method for me to make friends. The school was simply too big and overwhelming. Berkeley didn’t give a shit about you. If you didn’t try exceedingly hard, you would surly be swept under.
Maddy feels similarly swallowed by Penn. It seems like everyone else is effortlessly gliding along when you are drowning. I’ve never had suicidal ideations - for the most part, sometimes things do get really dark but never to the point where I think of taking my own life - sometimes I do want to just sleep forever though. This is the thing I realized - you truly never know what someone else is feeling. What is a “good day� to someone else compared to your version? What do I know about the pressure that Simone Biles was feeling? I will NEVER know how she was feeling - because you can never truly get inside someone else’s head. It’s easy to sneer and judge - pressure is part of the job of being a famous athlete/actor! But I truly will never know the stories that their brains are telling them and it’s their life so they get to make their own decisions.
It’s so easy for me to look at beautiful Madison Holleran and say, “if only she had just held on and gotten help.� But the voices in her head were too loud. Life is hard but it is so so worth it. I want to be alive so much. I am so sad for those who do not get to keep having birthdays. They remind me how much I treasure life. They remind me to breathe deeply and to not hold back. I don’t want to play it safe and follow the rules. I want to live my life in a way that aligns with my values. They remind me that nothing is guaranteed. Even if I wake up groggy and cranky and I haven’t been sleeping well. I can snuggle my sweet perfect dog. I can drink coffee and watch the snow fall. I can hug my wonderful husband. I have built this sweet little life and I truly cherish it. I don’t want to ruminate on my imperfections. Don’t regret growing older, it’s a privilege denied to many.
Heres are some quotes that stuck out to me:
Of course, what remained hard to understand was the effect this would have on Madison’s psyche. She had never handled failure, even the garden-variety kind, well. During high school, Madison once finished fourth in the 400 hurdles at a county meet—much worse than expected. She started crying and asked to leave the event, even before cooling down. “She had a tremendous work ethic, and she worked hard at everything she did,� Stacy said. �**But she just put so much pressure on herself.�**
In high school, Madison won constantly, and that steady stream of victories strengthened her fragile psyche. But once she was at Penn, Jim and Stacy, along with her older sister Carli, began to notice the erosion of Madison’s confidence.
When Maddy was in middle school, she would walk to school in the mornings with kids in the neighborhood. As the year went on, she started timing how long the walk took. Once she had that specific number, she needed the next day to be faster, and the day after that, faster still. By the end of the year, she was speed-walking, occasionally breaking into a jog, to beat the previous day’s time. **There was something satisfying, calming almost, about controlling time and output in this way. She had created these little tests for herself, ones that she was fairly certain she could pass.**
**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.
School had always been straightforward: collect a specific set of numbers and letters, and receive your desired grade. That was not confusing; that was reassuring.
In high school, she had the perfect—well, everything,� Justine said. “She always stood out. But now, she wasn’t fully seeing her success, or all of her work paying off.
**Maddy often expected the worst.** To her, the prospect of failing out of Penn did not feel like hyperbole; it felt like the probable outcome. How could she believe otherwise, when she had no concrete evidence to the contrary? Everything had been flipped on its head, had become abstract. She was finishing behind a hundred other runners and was told that was good. She knew only half the answers on an art history test and was told not to panic.
Freshman year of college, especially for those playing a sport, is like walking through an obstacle course wearing a blindfold. No context exists for how hard the workouts will be, how long they will last, what each class will be like, what events are fun, what should be avoided. There is no yin-yang, either; no understanding that one week might feel grueling, unmanageable, but just hang on, because the following week will be light and easy. **For someone who struggles with the unknown, freshman year of college can feel like walking a path lined with land mines—heart racing, disaster around every corner.** Now add another variable: mental health.
I see a lot of myself in Maddy. I have never handled failure well. School made sense to me. I have always equated my self worth to an external marker, first grades, now salary. To me, self worth depended on success. I am just now realizing that self esteem may fluctuate but self worth is steady - a deep knowing that you are enough. Right now this concept is abstract but I’m working towards a base level of self regard, that does not rely on external success factors.
Maddy was a freshman at Penn on the track team who killed herself in January 2014 (eerily on my birthday...) I don’t remember her but I probably read a headline about her back then. This book has softened my stance on athletes and mental health - or more broadly fame/pressure and mental health. I used to think that it was complete bullshit that Simone Biles dropped out of the most recent Olympics due to “mental health.� I did not see this as a heroic act in the slightest. I saw it as a cop out because she wasn’t doing as well as she wanted. But I found it hypocritical because she had been ALL over tv cashing in on the upcoming Olympics. She was in soooo many ads. So I was very annoyed when she dropped out. She should have to give all that endorsement money back! What a fraud! Same with Naomi Osaka, the tennis star. Same with Jonah Hill - you can’t just opt out of doing PR - that’s part of your job!
But after listening to the first chunk of this book, I have a lot more empathy. First, I had forgotten how unbelievably disorienting and stressful freshman year of college was. I had a really hard time. I have repressed these memories and reframed college as a magical time. But it certainly was not. I stopped sleeping. I stopped going to the bathroom (I will never forgive Cal for its co-ed bathrooms - HORRIBLE). I had no idea how to feed myself. I discovered pretzel goldfish in the Unit 3 grab and go section of the cafeteria. I felt like a complete fraud and failure. I didn’t get into the “right� sorority. I didn’t know what to major in. I didn't get straight A's. It was brutal. The pressure was relentless. And at the same time, I wasn’t under any pressure but I felt like I was drowning. After working so hard in high school to get to college, I felt completely bereft. I had no map to follow. Life had been so prescribed - take AP classes, play sports, do extra curricular - all to get into the best college you can to eventually get the best job you can. But how were those four years supposed to go? Well I was “supposed� to apply to the business school but I was too intimidated. Everyone at Cal was so self assured. My roommate was a double major (she ended up not graduating with either of those majors but at the time I felt like I was supposed to know what to do). I am still perplexed by those who came in as declared engineering majors. What is engineering? I still don’t know. How did they know they wanted to be engineers??? A friend of mine tried to transfer into engineering and didn’t get in. So really you have to know before you even apply. So at age 17 you must know that you want to be an engineer. But there are no engineering classes in high school. Someone please make it make sense! It has to be that their parents were engineers. So if you’re parents aren’t engineers, you will never be one. Another friend came in declared as an EECS major - electrical engineering and computer science - what is electrical engineering!?
I made one friend that wasn’t in my sorority freshman year. She had dropped out of sorority rush because she hated it. She left Cal after freshman year and transferred to UC Irvine to be near home. She told me how much she hated Cal and I tried to encourage her to join a sorority because that had been the only method for me to make friends. The school was simply too big and overwhelming. Berkeley didn’t give a shit about you. If you didn’t try exceedingly hard, you would surly be swept under.
Maddy feels similarly swallowed by Penn. It seems like everyone else is effortlessly gliding along when you are drowning. I’ve never had suicidal ideations - for the most part, sometimes things do get really dark but never to the point where I think of taking my own life - sometimes I do want to just sleep forever though. This is the thing I realized - you truly never know what someone else is feeling. What is a “good day� to someone else compared to your version? What do I know about the pressure that Simone Biles was feeling? I will NEVER know how she was feeling - because you can never truly get inside someone else’s head. It’s easy to sneer and judge - pressure is part of the job of being a famous athlete/actor! But I truly will never know the stories that their brains are telling them and it’s their life so they get to make their own decisions.
It’s so easy for me to look at beautiful Madison Holleran and say, “if only she had just held on and gotten help.� But the voices in her head were too loud. Life is hard but it is so so worth it. I want to be alive so much. I am so sad for those who do not get to keep having birthdays. They remind me how much I treasure life. They remind me to breathe deeply and to not hold back. I don’t want to play it safe and follow the rules. I want to live my life in a way that aligns with my values. They remind me that nothing is guaranteed. Even if I wake up groggy and cranky and I haven’t been sleeping well. I can snuggle my sweet perfect dog. I can drink coffee and watch the snow fall. I can hug my wonderful husband. I have built this sweet little life and I truly cherish it. I don’t want to ruminate on my imperfections. Don’t regret growing older, it’s a privilege denied to many.
Heres are some quotes that stuck out to me:
Of course, what remained hard to understand was the effect this would have on Madison’s psyche. She had never handled failure, even the garden-variety kind, well. During high school, Madison once finished fourth in the 400 hurdles at a county meet—much worse than expected. She started crying and asked to leave the event, even before cooling down. “She had a tremendous work ethic, and she worked hard at everything she did,� Stacy said. �**But she just put so much pressure on herself.�**
In high school, Madison won constantly, and that steady stream of victories strengthened her fragile psyche. But once she was at Penn, Jim and Stacy, along with her older sister Carli, began to notice the erosion of Madison’s confidence.
When Maddy was in middle school, she would walk to school in the mornings with kids in the neighborhood. As the year went on, she started timing how long the walk took. Once she had that specific number, she needed the next day to be faster, and the day after that, faster still. By the end of the year, she was speed-walking, occasionally breaking into a jog, to beat the previous day’s time. **There was something satisfying, calming almost, about controlling time and output in this way. She had created these little tests for herself, ones that she was fairly certain she could pass.**
**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.
School had always been straightforward: collect a specific set of numbers and letters, and receive your desired grade. That was not confusing; that was reassuring.
In high school, she had the perfect—well, everything,� Justine said. “She always stood out. But now, she wasn’t fully seeing her success, or all of her work paying off.
**Maddy often expected the worst.** To her, the prospect of failing out of Penn did not feel like hyperbole; it felt like the probable outcome. How could she believe otherwise, when she had no concrete evidence to the contrary? Everything had been flipped on its head, had become abstract. She was finishing behind a hundred other runners and was told that was good. She knew only half the answers on an art history test and was told not to panic.
Freshman year of college, especially for those playing a sport, is like walking through an obstacle course wearing a blindfold. No context exists for how hard the workouts will be, how long they will last, what each class will be like, what events are fun, what should be avoided. There is no yin-yang, either; no understanding that one week might feel grueling, unmanageable, but just hang on, because the following week will be light and easy. **For someone who struggles with the unknown, freshman year of college can feel like walking a path lined with land mines—heart racing, disaster around every corner.** Now add another variable: mental health.
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