When Madison got back to her dorm room that night, she sat at her desk and powered up her MacBook Pro. Over winter break, she had asked her friends what she should write to Steve Dolan, the Penn track coach, about how she was feeling. The only problem: none of her friends knew how she was really feeling. Only she did.
She scooted her rolling black chair closer to the desk. Above her right shoulder were four square corkboards onto which she had pinned dozens of photos of her high school friends. One of her favorites was from the New Balance national championships just a few months before. Madison is standing with her relay team, the four of them shoulder to shoulder, beaming.
She began typing.
Although this has been extremely difficult to put into words, I’m going to do my best to explain my first semester at Penn and where it’s led me.
Before I begin I just want to say I have the utmost respect and admiration for you as a coach and a person and that I know I wouldn’t be at this school if it weren’t for you. I also want you to know that you aren’t at fault for anything negative I’ve felt over the past couple months in any way.
Here goes.
In Real Life
I am sitting in the makeup chair inside Media 3, a live-shot studio in New York City just around the corner from Grand Central. The makeup room is small, like a converted broom closet, and in a few minutes I will appear on the ESPN program Outside the Lines. The makeup artist is a woman I have known for about a year, although we see each other only occasionally. She has recently had a death in the family, and I ask her how she’s doing.
She lowers the brush in her hand, looks directly at me: “It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve realized one thing: being happy is a choice. I have to be strong for everyone around me. And I’m choosing to be happy.”
My jaw tightens. I tilt my head. I am not sure if I should respond. She is dealing with a loss, and maybe I should support however she manages to get through her days. And yet, I can’t abide the idea she has just introduced into the space between us. Saying nothing feels like tacit agreement, a willingness to perpetuate, even implicitly, this particular idea of happiness as moral superiority.
I open my mouth, then close it, then open it again: “I mean, I hear you, but I’m not sure everyone can choose to be happy. Sometimes whatever is going on in their brain can’t just be willed away, you know?”
“You’re right, you’re right,” she says, reaching for the mascara. “But I just think you can’t let the demons get you.”
“Right, but maybe your demons aren’t as persistent as someone else’s.”
She is mixing two colors of blush and doesn’t seem to hear this. After a delay, she says, “Mmmhmm.”
I leave a minute later.
I met Megan Armstrong on Twitter. She is a young writer who studied journalism at the University of Missouri, one of the best such programs in the country. We follow each other online. She wrote a novel, and through social media I vaguely gathered that the book touched on issues of mental health and suicide. She also regularly engaged with NFL player Brandon Marshall, an outspoken advocate for mental health awareness. In 2011, the wide receiver was diagnosed with a mood disorder, but rather than hide the news, Marshall publicly announced his diagnosis. He had a platform and had decided to use it to help end the stigma around mental illness. None of the issues that Megan and Brandon were grappling with were in the forefront of my mind.
I am fairly mentally healthy. I mean, I think I am. (Can anyone ever really know for sure?) And no one in my immediate family deals with significant mental health issues. If pressed, I could have offered a general sense of the mental health space, of Megan and Brandon’s roles in them, but I had no reason to directly or personally engage with either.
The first time I reached out to Megan, it was because someone who had read Madison’s story in ESPN The Magazine, in a piece called “Split Image,” was direct-messaging me on Twitter, and I felt ill equipped to respond. This person told me they had long battled depression and suicidal thoughts, and that I seemed like someone who was willing to listen. They asked if they could call me. I panicked. I knew very little about communicating with someone who might feel they no longer wanted to live. Megan held my hand as I responded to this reader, making sure they found appropriate help.
Then I started talking to Megan, on text, for long stretches each day, asking her any questions about depression and anxiety that she was willing to answer. Which, as it turns out, was all of them. I had received hundreds of e-mails after Madison’s story came out, some more difficult to read than others, one referring to “the monster within.”
I wanted to understand, as best I could, what this monster looked and felt like.
May 2015:
Kate: So, it’s incredible to me that someone is feeling existence in such a vastly different way.
Megan: I think that all the time.
Kate: I’ve never been so intensely aware of how lucky I am that, generally speaking, I feel mentally healthy.
Megan: Yes, it’s a privilege for sure. I learned long ago that a good day for me is not the same as a good day for most people. Do people such as yourself who are mentally healthy have questions about those who aren’t? Because I always have questions about mentally healthy people.
Kate: I have a million questions.
Megan: I’m not an expert, and I don’t have letters after my name, but if you ever want to ask them, I’ll answer.
Kate: I just wish I could understand. I mean, is my worst day (mentally) better than your best day?
Megan: Probably.
Kate: I’m sure it’s all on a sliding scale, and people are in the middle, etc, but if we’re just talking someone who doesn’t deal with depression talking to someone who does.
Megan: + anxiety + mood disorder. It’s quite the cocktail.
Kate: Right. There are a lot of variables.
Megan: But I’m at the point where I can separate my experiences and which of those three—depression, anxiety, mood disorder—caused them, both currently and retrospectively.
Megan: Maddy’s experience was mine in very many ways. It was almost spooky. The only difference, of course, is that sadly I’m the only one still here.
Kate: Goodness. So true.
Kate: What do you feel like when you wake up in the morning?
Megan: It usually goes in this order: I spend a minute deciphering whether the dream I just woke up from is reality or not, then I get really pissed that I’m awake, then I lay there for a while scheming ways I can stay in bed for as long as possible and avoid the world. In short: I feel like I’ve already lost the day just by opening my eyes.
Megan: Oh and then I get sad that I feel that way.
Kate: So the dream is always better than waking up?
Kate: And how do you feel if you wake up in the middle of the night?
Megan: Not always. Sometimes I have really horrible nightmares, which my medications intensify. I also have a photographic memory so it’s like impossible to forget my dreams, nightmares or good ones.
Megan: I don’t remember the last time I slept the night all the way through.
Kate: When was the last time you woke up in the morning excited for the day?