But neither could Maddy dismiss transferring. Maybe, she kept telling herself, she had it wrong; maybe transferring would be just the thing, despite evidence to the contrary. Maddy wasn’t sure how to make herself feel better. She knew what used to make her happy: a finely tuned balance of sports, school, and friends. In high school she was a champ at all three, and each fueled the others. After a night of partying, she liked getting up to run, to sweat out the alcohol; then that afternoon she’d spend a few hours studying, decompressing. Each part was connected to the next, like a spiral staircase that seemed to lead always higher. In high school she even had time for herself, to draw and read, to write down quotes, to be inside her own head without an agenda.
This is what she wanted at Penn, and Madison continued to try to find each part and connect them. But instead of everything building toward something better, something more whole, it felt like everything was unraveling. She would get up early for morning practice only to arrive at classes feeling zapped of energy, which caused her anxiety about how she would make it through afternoon practice. At afternoon practice, she would stress about what she might have missed in class because she was tired, and by the time the day’s obligations were over, she had little energy left to go out and develop the kind of natural, easy friendships she’d had in high school.
At first she convinced herself the problem was time management—specifically, her own sloppy time management. Madison believed she just had to plan better. If she wanted to be happy, she would need to be more diligent about her pursuit of it. So she started blocking off time on her schedule for each endeavor. Of course, happiness is often most elusive to those actively chasing it, but that didn’t stop Maddy from trying. She and Ingrid would often have sessions when Maddy clearly explained the objectives of each part of the day: practices, classes, studying, socializing. The whole thing felt color-coded, like blocks of time on a child’s calendar. Routine had always comforted her. Perhaps now it would save her.
Everything was in her control, except the one thing that wasn’t: this pain that had embedded itself inside her, somewhere she could not find, and no matter how tightly she controlled everything else, it wouldn’t go away. Where she may have exerted the most control was in her social accounts—her favorite being Instagram. Unforeseen variables consistently affected her daily game plan, her life at Penn, but she had end-to-end control over the images that told the story of her life. Even if Madison was not having the college experience everyone told her she should be having, she could certainly make it seem like she was.
“Love when Ma Jimbo comes to watch.” (Madison Holleran)
In life, counterintuitive correlations exist between a number of behaviors: we often assume that those who speak highly of themselves do so because they possess a wealth of self-confidence. Of course, bragging is often just a hollow stand-in, a kind of scarecrow meant to distract from the gnawing reality of insecurity. We often label someone who loves going out dancing and drinking a free spirit, when often they’re trying to escape feeling trapped. Things are rarely as they seem, especially if overcompensation distorts the image we’re presented. This is also true for Instagram: the more polished and put-together someone seems—everything lovely and beautiful and just as it should be—perhaps the more likely something vital is falling apart just offscreen.
At Penn, Maddy used to work out with her friend Ashley Montgomery, who also ran track for the Quakers. On off days, they would go to the gym together or go running outside. Once, in mid-November, the two of them went for a run through the Penn campus. Madison spotted a quote, part of a mural, on the side of a building. She asked Ashley if she could stop and take a picture, which she uploaded to Instagram. A minute later, the two continued running. A few hours afterward, when Ashley went to Instagram to see the picture, the image was gone. Madison had deleted it. This happened another time, too, with another quote; this one Madison uploaded from the gym while they were both working out.
What exactly was the correlation between the two deleted posts, Ashley can’t say for certain. Maybe the quotes were too negative, too preachy; or maybe they too accurately reflected an internal struggle Madison quickly realized she didn’t want others to see. Then again, maybe it was nothing of the kind; maybe she just didn’t like the look of the pictures—they didn’t measure up. Something may have felt off about them, and that she could not abide.
As November wore on, Maddy became increasingly anxious and uneasy, but her family and friends weren’t raising a red flag. They were aware—how could they not be?—that freshman year at Penn was not going as Maddy had expected and that she was struggling with that reality. She texted her parents frequently—or rather, her parents texted her and she responded. But she didn’t call them multiple times a day, as did some of her classmates.
Her life had always gone as Maddy expected it would go, as she predicted and willed, despite her near-constant worrying that it would not. Perhaps, her parents thought, she had started to believe that that’s how life worked. There was a sense in her family that maybe Maddy would learn a crucial life lesson: how to navigate life when it didn’t seem to yield.
Also, the Hollerans had four other kids to worry about. Carli was married, and she and her husband, Scott, were expecting their first child, a boy, in just a few weeks. Ashley was now happily settled at the University of Alabama, which she loved. And Mackenzie and Brendan were both at Northern Highlands, where each played several sports and did everything else young teenagers do.
Maddy was, of course, a priority, but there was no shortage of kids to check in on, to keep safe. Stacy and Jim knew that their middle daughter needed help, but they figured they would work with Madison over the coming months to try to understand what might make her happy. When it came to Madison’s troubles, they both felt they had one commodity in abundance: time.
By Thanksgiving break, Maddy’s anxiety and unease were morphing into something she couldn’t name, and she was visibly struggling to stay present in the moment. Jim and Ashley, who had flown home from Alabama, drove to Philadelphia on Tuesday to pick her up for the holiday. She didn’t have to return to Philly until Sunday, yet from the moment she sat down in the car, Madison was already projecting five days into the future and anticipating the sadness that returning to campus would bring. “This week is going to go too quickly,” she told her dad before it had even begun.