Kate: How do you feel about people who don’t struggle with their mental health?
Megan: I feel that everyone struggles with their mental health to a degree because life is hard but mental illness is when that struggle inhibits you from your daily life. So, my feeling toward people who don’t have that? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous. But I’m not that much of a unicorn. I know people deal with this shit. A lot of people.
Kate: What’s your biggest fear?
Megan: Dying before I’ve had the chance to really live.
Kate: And biggest hope?
Megan: To be able to go day-to-day and feel excited about it—to feel full.
CHAPTER 2
August 23, 2013
Madison woke up early. She sat up in bed, beneath the sloped white ceiling of her childhood room, within its painted red walls. She looked around. Leaning against the wall was the corkboard she would take with her to college, the bib from her national championship race pinned to the top left corner. Across the room was an old white desk on which Maddy had once dangled all the medals she won.
She had been waiting all summer for this day: the day she left for college. Three weeks prior, she had posted a picture on Instagram of one of the most beautiful buildings on Penn’s campus, writing, “T–3 weeks left.”
Leaving for college was all she and her high school friends talked about. Everything that summer pointed toward the next step. That’s how they talked about it, as if that summer was the equivalent of waiting in the boarding area for flights to exotic cities, anticipation clinging to everything. When they were sophomores and juniors at Northern Highlands, a few of their older friends would leave for school, then come home to visit and talk about how they wanted to transfer or take a semester off. Madison and her friends were baffled. They would say, “What? This is so confusing—how can you not like college?”
Madison’s sister Ashley was one of these older kids. She would come home every weekend from Penn State and talk about how miserable she was. Madison would press her, confused about what her sister was feeling.
No one among them, parents included, cautioned that the transition to college might be unexpectedly difficult. Part of why no parent did so must have been because they simply could not imagine it would be. College had been different for their generation. For one thing, they grew up without the Internet, without video games, without social media. Madison and her friends were the first generation of “digital natives”—kids who’d never known anything but connectivity. That connection, at its most basic level, meant that instead of calling your parents once a week from the dorm hallway, you could call and text them all day long, even seeking their approval for your most mundane choices, like what to eat at the dining hall. Constant communication may seem reassuring, the closing of physical distance, but it quickly becomes inhibiting. Digital life, and social media at its most complex, is an interweaving of public and private personas, a blending and splintering of identities unlike anything other generations have experienced. Jim and Stacy, Susie and Kobus, and millions of other parents hadn’t yet considered how the Internet might be affecting their kids, how it was fostering an increased dependence on outside validation, and consequently a decreased ability to soothe themselves. In 2013, these were just beginning to register as increasing concerns.
When Jim was growing up, good colleges were challenging to get into, but it wasn’t like it is today, when being a solid, diligent student is no longer enough. Students today must display excellence—not just competence—in numerous areas. The pressure to be great, not just good, is unrelenting. Believing that this pressure will simply disappear once kids arrive on campus seems like wishful thinking.
In Allendale, college is the ultimate destination, the goal toward which almost every student works. If coming of age used to mean summers and weekends working at 7-Eleven cleaning the Slurpee machine to make a few extra bucks to buy your favorite record, now it’s about checking boxes on a college application: becoming fluent in a second language, volunteering at a shelter, taking weekly SAT prep courses.
As move-in day approached, Maddy became anxious about the unknown. But she didn’t feel like talking about these feelings. She didn’t want to be the one to say, “Hey, you guys, is anyone else maybe a little scared about this?” What if they weren’t scared? What if, instead, her friends looked at her, heads tilted, like something was wrong with her?
And anyway, she was mostly excited. She wanted to focus on that.
She got out of bed that morning and waded through her messy bedroom, which looked as if her closet had exploded. Her room was always a disaster, clothes strewn across every available surface—hats and bags layered on hooks, the carpeted floor covered in worn clothes, the dresser with bottles of lotions and perfumes, the yellow chair stacked high with books and notebooks. The space was at complete odds with the rest of her life, which was meticulously presented, nothing out of place.
Maddy had already packed everything that mattered, preselecting an outfit for the day: light-blue high-waisted shorts, a pink bralette with a lace shirt, and tan gladiator sandals. And, of course, she wore a running watch on her right wrist so she could time her runs or anything else that needed measuring, such as her walk to class or her studying sessions.
Her roommate, Emily Quinn, was also on the Penn track team. The two had met earlier that summer during a team bonding weekend in the Poconos. Maddy wanted to arrive first at the dorm room, mostly because she liked to be first in everything, so she and Stacy left Allendale early.
When mother and daughter walked into the room, Stacy pulled out her iPhone and snapped a candid picture of her daughter. The room is bare, a twin bed on each side, a sallow light glowing from above—it is every dorm room everywhere. In the middle of the room, arms raised in a V, stands Madison, palms upward, eyes closed, mouth open in a smile. She’s holding a half-eaten red apple in her right hand, and she looks as if she has just stuck the landing on a dismount.
The picture is blurry, but the energy radiating from the image is unmistakable: freedom, euphoria.
Later that afternoon, after all the obligatory errands—to Target, to Office Max, to the Penn student center—Madison was settled in her new space. The bed was made: pink comforter, accent pillow with lowercase m. The desk area was tidy, efficient, colorful, with a pink iPhone dock and pink wastepaper basket, a small black fan on one level, a mug holding pens and pencils on the next. Beneath the desk was a purple plastic container filled with shampoo, body gel, and conditioner. And on the top corner of the tiered desk, angled to lean against the wall, was a piece of art, the background green, with fragments of encouraging sayings. The words, in varying sizes, were stacked like Tetris pieces.
Dream Big
Laugh Out Loud
Be Happy