“You think if you break them up, it’s going to look like people want them?” joked Brooke, whose relationship with Maddy had always been one of needling each other. Brooke began collecting all the broken cookies, piecing them back together, then returning them to the Pathmark container, proving that none had been eaten. Maddy laughed.
During the dinner, Madison sent a text message to Ingrid that included a picture of the seven friends, arms around one another. “These are the types of friends we need to find at Penn,” she wrote beneath the image. At the end of the night, everyone hugged. Madison kept repeating, “Love you, see you soon!” as if their future held endless nights like these.
Maddy had told all her friends, even those she wasn’t especially close to, that she planned to quit track. And, as she and her parents had discussed, she had sent an e-mail to Steve Dolan requesting a meeting once she had returned to campus. Stacy was planning to drive down to Philadelphia to join her daughter for the sit-down. Dolan responded to the e-mail the afternoon before Maddy returned to school.
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 2:29 PM, Stephen Dolan wrote:
Madison,
I’m looking forward to seeing you and talking on Monday. Congratulations on such a strong first semester academically. Just so you know, you had the 5th highest semester GPA of our entire women’s track team!
See you soon!
From: Madison Holleran
Date: Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 9:53 PM
Subject: Re: Penn Track
To: Stephen Dolan
Thanks! Certainly wasn’t an easy semester. Looking forward to seeing you too!
1/10/14 3:26 PM
Greg: What’s going on with everything? Are you going back to school? Are you running track?
Greg: Hahaha sorry for the overload. If you don’t want to talk about it idc.
Maddy: Hahahahahaa
Maddy: Yes I’m going back to school tomorrow. Can’t say I’m ecstatic. And I’m having a meeting with my coach about everything on Monday. And as of now, not anticipating to stay on track
Greg: das mah face. I guess you gotta do what’s best for you though. It makes me a little sad to think about you not playing a sport. Tomorrow though?!!!! No coffee . I guess that just means a trip to Penn is in order!!
1/10/14 2:54 PM
Maddy: Going back to skewl tomorrow
Will: Just saw that text from last night
Maddy:
Maddy: Imma give Penn another shot
Maddy: 1 more chance
Will: It’s like a slap in the face cause penn is so much more fun than Princeton
Will: I feelz ya
Maddy: Yeah it is really fun hahah I just don’t know if it’s the right school for me yaaaa know
Maddy: penn rocks my socks
Maddy: im determined to like this semester
Will:
Maddy:
Madison Holleran
Writ015-302 Medieval in Art and Film
Final Portfolio
Cover Letter
3 December 2013
Dear reader,
My decision to take writing seminar during the first semester of college is something I most certainly do not regret. In all honesty, because of the “Medieval in Art and Film” seminar and the “known-item outline” assignment, I checked out the first book of my college career from Van Pelt library… As the semester comes to an end, I can proudly say I look forward to utilizing my newly acquired skills from this course in the many other courses I will take part in at Penn.
Thank you,
Madison Holleran
In high school, Maddy’s favorite teacher had been Mr. Quinn, who taught math. She liked the subject, and she liked the way Mr. Quinn taught, but she actually preferred writing. Even though she was drawn to the arts, she was concerned about pursuing it as a degree or as her future career. Business school, she thought, would be a much more direct, reasonable path. She mentioned to Emma that perhaps she would try transferring to Wharton, Penn’s famed business school. “Really, she was confused as to what she wanted to do,” Emma said. “She honestly didn’t know. She liked writing, and I remember her saying maybe she could be a writer later on. But she knew it was hard to graduate from college and write. ‘If I go to business school,’ she told me, ‘that would be more practical.’ I think I could see her in communications, in public relations, for sure—something with fashion or social media. I know she would be smart enough for business, but she didn’t love it.”
Maddy’s imagination, her free spirit, kept snagging on the hook of practicality.
The Quitting Game
When I wanted to quit basketball during my freshman year at the University of Colorado, I told my friends and roommates my plan, which was both a way of testing the idea and also a way of gauging my ability to say the words aloud. Quitting sounded weak. But also delicious and necessary, and I vacillated between desperately wanting to never again dribble a basketball and also fearing that I was nobody without the sport.
None of my friends and roommates told me not to quit. After barely a pause, they all said something like “Whatever will make you happy,” then went about their day. I didn’t quite understand at the time that very few people (save for a parent, maybe a best friend) spend much time thinking about someone else’s problems. Asking for permission rarely results in layered, nuanced discussion. And even if it had, I had no clue how I might explain myself because I really didn’t know what I wanted; I just knew something needed to change.
I was terrified of the word “quit.” Within sports, that word is dirty and barely distinguishable from “I can’t.” I had come to view quitting as synonymous with laziness, weakness, and selfishness. If you quit during a drill, you were lazy and weak. If you quit in the middle of a season, maybe you were not only lazy and weak, but selfish, too, willing to let down your teammates. Strict parameters like this felt suffocating, impossible to navigate, as if everywhere I turned, the door to leaving was slamming closed. If I tried to push out anyway, everyone watching me leave would also be judging me. Could I ever stop? Could something be too much without me being not enough? The either/or thinking that permeates sports makes stepping aside, during a drill or a season, a referendum on character, on its deficiencies.
What was the difference between quitting and stopping, or quitting and retiring, or quitting and making the conscious decision that continuing something was genuinely unhealthy? The difference lay in semantics. And yet, depending on the lens through which someone else viewed my decision (which I could not control), I would become in their eyes either wise or weak—and more likely the latter. Of this, I was keenly aware. (So, too, was Madison.)
How much of our happiness is fueled by society’s validation of our choices? It seems that the younger we are, the more dependent we are on making choices others will value and praise—perhaps because we haven’t developed, or don’t yet fully trust, our ability to name or even know what makes us happy.
In my memoir, The Reappearing Act, I told a version of the following story (with some expanded thoughts added below) about my attempt to quit college basketball: