CHAPTER 7
Snow Falling
Madison was in her version of pajamas: a T-shirt and sweatpants. Emma wore a variation of the same, but with the Boston College logo instead of Penn’s on the shirt. They had bagels and tea, and were making pancakes at Emma’s house. The falling snow outside gave them a reason to stay hunkered down and to be lazy. A group of them had slept over at the Sullivans’ house the previous night, including Brooke and Justine, but the other girls had to leave early, so it was Maddy and Emma, along with Emma’s mom, Lorraine, who lingered in the kitchen, making breakfast and talking. It was Christmas break, so nobody had anyplace they had to be.
It was during these one-on-one interactions when Lorraine best understood her daughter’s closest friend, though Lorraine was convinced that she might never truly connect with Maddy. A part of Maddy seemed closed off, unknowable. Oddly this tendency was exacerbated in group settings, when Madison would often retreat into herself, choosing to sit at the table and study rather than join everyone else. None of Madison’s group noticed these subtle differences between their friend and everyone else, but how could they? They were immersed in these moments themselves. Their parents were of course less so. In addition, there was the simple matter of sample size and experience—their ability to place Maddy in a larger context, just one among thousands of other interactions. Having interacted with dozens of their kids’ friends, the parents had a spectrum on which to judge the normalcy of each interaction, each person.
Emma saw Maddy from up close, as if looking in a mirror, while her parents and other adults were able to watch them both from afar, able to interpret the totality of their words and actions. “Madison is different than your other friends,” more than more parent told a daughter during high school.
Lorraine was a good five years older than Maddy’s parents, Jim and Stacy, but they had all grown up together on Long Island. The Holleran clan had been a big family around town. Although they had grown up in the shadows of New York City, the Long Island community operated almost like the small town Allendale was years later: people knew plenty about their neighbors. Depression and anxiety existed on Jim’s side of the family, but these weren’t the types of issues that families often spoke about with one another or anyone else. Mental health issues were handled privately; things weren’t spilled out into the open to be deconstructed and understood.
Madison, unfortunately, was never good at understanding why she was feeling a certain way. Often she communicated best through writing, not conversation. This made discussing her feelings with her parents and friends—beyond texting—very difficult.
Her demeanor in the kitchen at Emma’s house was Exhibit A: she could not, or chose not to, name exactly what was happening with her at Penn. On this snowy morning in early January, the two friends openly expressed their shared disappointment with college. But after a while, the conversation tilted again toward Madison.
“So what exactly are you most upset about?” Lorraine asked.
“I think it’s track,” Maddy said. “It’s making me unhappy—it’s just too much. It’s just not what I expected.”
That felt like a problem Maddy could solve: stop running track.
“But it’s more than that,” she continued. “I’m spending so much time studying, but I can’t seem to get ahead. And I’m tired all the time, but I can’t sleep. And… I just don’t know what exactly is wrong.”
She was skinny, drained. So beautiful you couldn’t stop staring, and yet in that moment all you could notice was the emptiness in her eyes. She was twitchy, nervous, but didn’t exactly know why. The conversation kept going in circles, with Emma and her mom trying to understand and help but Maddy failing to express anything tangible enough for them to untangle. Maddy would drop her head, clearly defeated, the gesture a kind of desperation conveying urgency, and this would launch them into another round of questions. This went on for hours.
At one point Lorraine considered asking her daughter’s friend if suicidal thoughts had crossed her mind, but she dismissed the question as an extreme reaction. Maddy hadn’t taken the conversation to that level and didn’t seem to warrant that kind of concern, so Lorraine didn’t want to hit a panic button that didn’t exist. This question, to nearly everyone who considers it, feels loaded. They feel they may be introducing an option rather than reflecting one that’s already been considered.
That morning, the conversation among the three of them continually circled back to one potential fix: Madison should quit track. She had, it seemed, hung her hopes on this solution. For the previous few weeks, Madison had been texting most of her friends, especially those from Northern Highlands, that she was considering quitting track or transferring, or occasionally both: quit track at Penn, then transfer to Lehigh to play soccer, or transfer to Vanderbilt, or, well—anything other than continuing with her current situation.
Maddy: Like I wanna go to Lehigh now.
Emma: You would transfer???
Maddy: Idk
Maddy: Yeah
Maddy: I don’t fucking know what to do
Maddy: Don’t tell anyone this tho
Emma: Obviously not
Emma: But I don’t know if you would wanna play for the Lehigh guy
Maddy: Idk but Clara loves it there
12/30/13 1:20 PM
Maddy: Would it be crazy if I transferred?? Lol
Izzy: Where?
Maddy: Idk I think maybe Vanderbilt
Maddy: Just for school
Maddy: F track
Maddy: I want to soooo badly
Maddy: I hate it
12/28/13 11:01 PM
Maddy: Not even kidding Ingrid I’m highly debating quitting too. Legit. So sad but I just don’t like it at all anymore 
Ingrid: Me neither in fact I dread it
Maddy: My coach would be APPALLED. But like I seriously just wanna do club soccer
Maddy: What did your parents say?
Ingrid: My mom is totally supportive and my dad would be kinda disappointed that I didn’t stick out a commitment
Ingrid: Have you talked to your fam about it?
Maddy: Not exactly… but I need to ASAP. It would just make life so much easier but the concept of quitting is muuuuuuuch easier than carrying out the process haha like I don’t even know how I would do it/what to say
12/28/13 11:03 PM
Maddy: I may quit track 
Jack: Why…
Jack: You would be a NARP [non-athletic regular person]
Maddy: I know which would fucking blow
Maddy: But it SUCKS a lot
12/30/13
Maddy: Emma I miss soccer and being on a CLOSE team
Maddy: Like I stalked Clara’s Facebook and Lehigh looks so fun
Emma: I know……
Emma: So much……
Maddy: It fucking sucks idk what to do
Maddy: Like I wanna play again
Maddy: I’m so over my team in all honesty
Emma: Madison you can walk on……
Maddy: At Penn!? No fuckin way
Emma: Yessssss you are 100% good enough. The PENN STATE coach liked you
From: Madison Holleran
Date: Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 9:46 AM
Subject: blood tests
To: REDACTED
Hi coach! Happy new years eve!!
Unfortunately, I won’t be getting the results from the blood tests back until January 10th when I go back to the doctor. [Madison had blood tests to make sure she wasn’t sick.] What should the plan be until then?
1/2/14
Emma: So Vanderbilt?
Maddy: I wanna!!!!!!
Emma: Ahhhhhhh!!!
Emma: Are you gonna go back?
Maddy: I don’t wanna at all
Maddy: At all.
After cycling through all the options, ping-ponging from one to another over winter break, Madison seemed resigned to the fact that she would return to Penn for the second semester. She had been so thrilled with the Ivy League just months before: wouldn’t it be a mistake to throw all that away? Her parents were doing the best they could, trying to shepherd their ailing daughter toward the best possible solution. They worried: Wouldn’t she regret giving up on her dream so quickly? They didn’t want to just throw open the doors and let her trample on her future. They wanted to help Maddy alleviate anxiety in a way that wouldn’t set her back too far. Because the truth is, when you don’t know the stakes, when you don’t know how high the wire actually is, dancing along the edge doesn’t seem reckless; it seems like the only place to walk.
By the time Maddy was sitting across from Emma and Lorraine, the question really wasn’t whether she would return to Penn, but rather how she could improve her life there. Over the previous twenty-four hours, she had begun soliciting advice from her friends. She would soon begin to compose a letter to Steve Dolan, the Penn track coach, and she wanted help with the language and ideas; but mostly, she wanted her friends to participate, because then it would feel less like she was quitting. That afternoon, after spending the morning at the Sullivans’, Maddy texted her teammate Ashley Montgomery.
1/3/14 2:14 PM
Maddy: Ash I need to talk to you
Ash: About what’ve
Ash: *what??
Maddy: About track. Like I’ve honestly been thinking seriously about transferring because I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to talk to my parents about quitting track and seeing if things get better, but I just don’t want the team to HATE me. Like completely hate me, but I just can’t be happy doing it anymore like at all. It’s awful. And I wish I could want to do it, but I can’t. And I’m just completely stuck about it all.
Ash: They won’t hate you you’ve gotta do what’s right for you… is it a for sure decision and then you’re gonna think about the transfer thing throughout the semester?
Maddy: No I don’t WANT to transfer. I’m gonna see how this semester turns out ya know?
Maddy: Transferring just would be so complex and difficult
Maddy: I wanna love penn! Like we always said
Maddy: And I feel like that’s possible to do
Maddy: Just gotta do the things that will make me happy again
Ash: Yeah well that makes sense are you gonna tell [Coach] Martin when you get back?
Maddy: Idkk yet gotta discuss with my mother and father first
On January 5, Ingrid texted Madison the link to an article on The Huffington Post titled “Ivy League Quitters: The Costs of Being an Ivy Athlete.” The author, Jennie Shulkin, attended Penn. She wrote, “The abnormality of the varsity athlete’s college experience begins even before he or she moves into the freshman dorms. Most Ivy athletes are officially recruited; they are accepted to the university in return for an informal agreement to serve on a sports team until graduation. This may sound like a good deal for the recruits, but it presently appears that the benefits of staying on an Ivy team are often not sufficient to prevent them from violating this informal agreement and quitting their respective sports.”
Shulkin continued: “Ex-Penn athletes leave their teams for a lot of the same reasons. First, understand that unlike other NCAA Division I recruits, no Ivy League athletes are given athletic scholarships, and are therefore devoting their time and effort to a cause without the expectation of compensation. If an athlete quits, no money can be revoked (since none was given originally), and he or she is allowed to continue college without financial or educational consequences. That being said, roughly all recruits plan to honor their commitments. They want to be student-athletes.
“However, since athletes cannot be punished for reneging on their informal commitments, many of them feel compelled to quit when they realize that many of the costs simply outweigh the benefits.”
The article went on to outline five key factors: the time commitment, the fact that sports seem to be the only priority of the coaches, the lack of reward or appreciation from others, the potential minimization of injuries, and the extra little things that push athletes over the edge. “The combination of the academics and athletics leaves little time for an internship or a part time job to earn extra income, an active social life, Greek life, clubs, and other aspects of a ‘normal’ college experience,” Shulkin wrote.
1/5/14 9:05 PM
Ingrid:…
Ingrid: Published today. Maybe a sign?
Maddy: Wait that article is SPOT ON
Ingrid: I know how crazy!!
Maddy: holy shit
Maddy: It’s so true too
Ingrid: What did your mom say?
Maddy: It’s definitely though like when I come back to penn I am 100 percent talking to my coach. Even with my mom like she’s coming hahaha I can’t do it anymore
Maddy: She really does not support the fact that I wouldn’t be on a team or doing a sport because sports have always been a huge part of me but I told her that I’m gonna try out for club soccer next year. Also she knew that I really really wasn’t happy on the team so she was like whatever will make you happiest, because she also knows that I really haven’t been feeling Penn overall. So we both agreed that something has to change ya know?
Maddy: Because if track was one of the primary factors for making me unhappy then obviously that’s gotta change.
Madison had kept her high school friends close the entire winter break. And on the night before the first among them would return for second semester, the group met at Justine’s house for a potluck dinner. They called this potluck “The Last Supper,” because so many of them were dreading the return to school. Each was responsible for bringing one item. Usually, Maddy would bake. She loved making cookies, often peanut butter ones. Throughout high school she would make homemade cookies for people—baking was a hobby of hers, even if eating the cookies was not.
That night, Madison brought cookies from Pathmark, which she arranged nicely on a platter. The group of friends sipped wine and reminisced about high school and discussed how surprisingly difficult college had been. When dessert time came, Madison pulled out the tray of Pathmark cookies. But MJ had made a homemade variation of s’mores. Next to this effort, Maddy’s cookies looked lackluster. Not to be deterred, she began breaking the cookies in half and placing them on everyone’s plates.
“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.
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: 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
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:
I did not want to play basketball anymore; could not stand another day of practice. And that’s exactly what I was about to tell Ceal Barry, the head women’s basketball coach at Colorado, the woman who had believed in me enough to offer a full scholarship. She was not the only coach to recruit me, but she was the only one whose program was consistently nationally ranked. When it came down to deciding where to go to school, I chose CU because I wanted to test myself at the highest level athletically. And here I was, crumbling beneath the weight—after only a few weeks of official basketball practice. I became desperate for everyday moments, which felt exotic. A trip to the grocery store made me feel like an outsider. Walking the aisles, watching people fill their carts, I felt as if I was in the zoo, on the outside looking in. I yearned to go home after classes and cook, to see movies, to do all the things I saw those around me doing, but which I never had time for. I became resentful.
That day I met Coach Barry, I was still wearing my practice gear: black mesh shorts and a reversible mesh jersey. I had grabbed my sweatshirt from the cubicle inside the weight room and pulled it over my head. Coach Barry was walking in front of me, leading the way out of the weight room, then snaking through the training room and into a corner office of some assistant trainer who wasn’t at work because it was Saturday. She flipped on the lights and lowered herself into the office’s chair.
My teammates and I had just lifted weights inside the Dal Ward Athletic Center, which overlooked the football stadium and offered, especially at dusk, an inspiring view of the Flatirons, the Boulder foothills leading to the crescendo of the Rocky Mountains. I stumbled my way through the lifting session, choking back tears, feeling broken, barely able to keep the dumbbells from crashing down and splitting my head open.
I slipped into the room with Coach Barry, but stood just inside the doorway, my back covering the light switch, as if I wasn’t fully committed to being there. At that moment, I didn’t feel capable of committing to much of anything. Coach didn’t seem to have any inkling of what I might say, but she was definitely aware of how pathetic I had been at practice lately. I closed the door behind us. She looked at me, expectantly.
“I just…” I glanced at her, then down at the tops of my sneakers. I told myself to look up again, to be mature. I met her gaze. “I think I’m going to have to quit,” I said. “That’s all. That’s what I needed to say.”
She leaned forward, closing the distance between us, and let out a long breath. My commitment to quitting was strong, but not ironclad. Although I was a sophomore academically, I was in my freshman season with the basketball team because I had spent the previous year on the injured list, after being granted a medical redshirt. I was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my right foot during the fall of 1999, before basketball practice even started, and I eventually had season-ending surgery that December, with the team doctor inserting a screw into the bone to keep it from fully breaking. As a result, I spent my first year at CU hanging out with my teammates and getting all of the benefits of being a college athlete without having to do much of the serious training. The list of perks was long: status of being a college athlete, free gear, behind-the-scenes access to football games, meals at training table, and, most importantly, the emotional support and companionship of a team. The coaching staff redshirted me, which meant I retained that year of eligibility.
As I stood in front of Coach Barry that October day, I was healthy again, at least physically. I could run and jump and shoot; I just had zero motivation to do so.
I had convinced myself I didn’t like basketball anymore. In fact, I took it one step further: I had never liked basketball. My father, Chris, was the one who loved the game; I was just mimicking him this entire time. And now that I was in the thick of it—hours and hours of mandatory practice, six days a week—I was being exposed as a fraud…
“I think quitting is a mistake,” Coach Barry said, lifting her head. She seemed about to say more, but paused, perhaps wanting to see how I would respond. I leaned into the wall and bounced my shoulders a few times, looking at the ceiling.
“My heart is just not in it,” I said, and I could feel my eyes burning, the twisting of the faucet behind my tear ducts. “I’m scared to death of practice. It’s the last place in the world I want to be. Nothing is going right.”
This last part was true; I was playing terribly. Coming out of high school, I had thought I was so damn good. I was one of the better scholastic players in New York State, but now I couldn’t even finish a drill without being told I had done it the wrong way and needed to do it over—and why was I so pathetic? (The last question was my own addition, the kind of destructive self-talk I gave in to as I walked to the end of the line during drills.)
Coach Barry stood and took a step toward me. She half sat, half leaned on the desk, clasping her hands on her lap. “This is what we’ll do,” she said. “You’ll give me two more weeks, and I’ll change how I coach you. I think that’s the problem here. Just give me two weeks.”
My lack of perspective was frightening in that moment. To me, two weeks felt like an outrageous sentence handed down by an angry judge. We practiced six days a week in the preseason, sometimes twice a day. Two weeks meant twelve to fourteen practices, totaling about forty hours of basketball. And do you know how many drills can be packed into that amount of time?
In my young mind, time was distorted. Even now, years later, I can still feel how panicked I felt about a period of time—just two weeks—that, now, I would consider manageable for just about anything. And I can distinctly remember how those words—fraud, weak, failure, quitter—rattled like rocks around my brain.
In 2013, The Guardian, a British newspaper, published an article under the headline “A stopwatch on the brain’s perception of time: Research by neuro-physiologists shows that our emotions affect our awareness of the passing of time.” In it, the paper dissects a study by French doctors who sought to understand how dopamine, which is usually lower in those dealing with depression, might affect our perception of time.
Above all, the brain’s perception of time involves processes linked to memory and attention: witness the impression that time is passing more quickly when we are busy, or doing something amusing or exciting. Time flies even when we are in love. In contrast, a watched pot never boils. Minutes drag by when we are bored…
Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in time processing. Dopamine agonists—compounds that activate dopamine receptors—tend to speed up our perception of time, which passes more quickly.
Recent research by neuro-physiologists and chemists working on time processing is beginning to show how emotions may speed up or slow down our perception of time. In 2011 professor Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil, a lecturer on cognition and learning at Poitiers University, France, published a study of how changes in the emotional state of subjects caused by watching films affect their sense of time.
Two weeks of basketball practice. Two more weeks of track practice. Two weeks until a college counselor has an opening in their schedule. Two more months of first semester. Six more months of freshman year. Four more years of college. A lifetime of uncertainty.
In 2015, I thought of all these variables as I sat with a hundred students inside the journalism building on the University of Massachusetts campus. Sitting in that room with me were students of all genders, athletes and nonathletes, freshmen and seniors, black and white and brown. But when we arrived at the topic of pressure, of perfectionism and quitting, all of them reacted the same way: knowingly. They had felt these pressures, to varying degrees. And they seemed hungry to be understood, and hungry to hear that many of their peers had felt the same way.
Those lucky enough to grow up envisioning college start hearing about the building blocks of a college résumé (the boxes that need checking; the optics that need preserving) from the moment they enter high school, and sometimes even sooner. Too often, kids are herded into commitments and activities that are born not of passion but of obligation. These obligations can continue for years because stopping is not seen as a possibility. Those who do stop risk being perceived as lacking the intestinal fortitude to push through when the going gets tough.
Of course, sometimes (perhaps even often) inner strength is exactly what’s needed and quitting is absolutely the wrong move, and if you push through the low points, you may find a reserve within yourself you never knew you had. But at other times, a commitment or decision can be accurately identified as the cause of unhappiness, and continuing to walk in that direction isn’t necessarily going to lead you through the wilderness to a bright, blue clearing with birds chirping and a flowing river at your feet. Continuing that path can bury you deeper and deeper in the woods until you’re lost, with no memory of how to get out.
Knowing the difference requires listening to and trusting yourself. Picture a doctor holding a stethoscope to your heart so that she can decipher even the shallowest of beats, the subtle shift in rhythm. That is the kind of precision with which you must know yourself in order to make these types of fork-in-the-road decisions. Yet are we equipping kids with the tools to pursue this empowering self-knowledge?
In Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, William Deresiewicz observes that our education system seems to be producing kids who have trouble thinking critically and finding their purpose. In an interview with Slate, he offered the following insight: “The point is not what you do but why you do it, how you choose it… I understand that parents are worried about their children’s future. But we have to look at what we’re doing to our kids. We have to have the strength to raise them to care about something other than ‘success’ in the very narrow terms in which it’s come to be defined. I’m not saying you can have it all: In fact, that’s one of my biggest messages in the book. You have to choose. Parents already tell their kids to ‘do what you love’ and ‘follow your dreams.’ But kids know that they don’t really mean it, that what they really want is status and success. Well, we have to really mean it.”
Inside that room at the University of Massachusetts, I told the story of how I had tried to quit college basketball. Yet before I got to my ultimate point, I looked out at the audience and could almost see their eyes glazing over, bracing to be scolded—perhaps about the frequency of quitting among their generation, about their collective lack of follow-through and focus. But that wasn’t my point at all. In fact, it was the opposite: Didn’t they agree that the stigma around quitting sometimes forces us to stay in toxic situations? And wasn’t it possible that this is even worse among millennials, who have been accused of being a fickle, lazy generation who require things to go their way?
At this the students seemed to lean forward, to let out a collective sigh. I asked whether any of them understood what I was trying to say—if they could relate, or if I was projecting my ideas onto the next generation. They stayed silent for a minute. Then a number of hands lifted. A young woman in the front row caught my eye. I nodded, encouraging her to share.
“I’m a sophomore now, here, but I initially started at a different college,” she said. “I was so unhappy, right from the beginning, but I didn’t think I could tell anyone, because I had told everyone that was the school of my dreams. I didn’t want anyone to think I was giving up, or quitting. And I couldn’t even understand, myself, if I was being weak, or if I genuinely needed to leave.”
“Right?” I said. “Sometimes it’s so confusing to know what the ‘best’ decision is—because, really, ultimately, who even knows?”
“I just got to a point where I was so unhappy, I talked to my parents about it.”
“What did they say?”
“They were supportive, but of course they didn’t want me to leave that school, because it was a brand name, and they were worried that I was jeopardizing my future options. And they were worried that I was too young to know what I wanted.”
“And how did you feel?” I asked.
“Trapped—it just wasn’t for me. And it finally got to the point where losing the identity of that school, how it supposedly reflected positively on me, was less important than needing to walk away and be happy again.”
“How did your parents deal with that?”
“They get it now. They see how much calmer and happier I am here.”
She lifted her UMass water bottle, took a sip. We continued the conversation for another half hour, the large group now beginning to resemble something more intimate. Some in attendance had transferred to UMass from other schools, while still others had considered leaving, perhaps believing they would be happier elsewhere. All were concerned about image—not just their own, but also the image of their generation as one that pursues self-satisfaction and happiness supposedly with brazen disregard for anything else, including ideals of responsibility and the greater good.
I took a leave of absence from ESPN to write parts of this book. On the first day I sat down to write, an e-mail popped into my inbox from Erik Rydholm, who is the executive producer of both Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption. The note included an audio file as well as a few sentences: “I wanted to pass along this sermon by the late Maurice Boyd. He preached in NYC for decades before passing in 2005. Luckily, some 600 or so of his sermons were recorded. This one is probably my favorite, and when I was listening to it again this morning, it made me think of you and Madison and this book.”
Boyd delivered this sermon, “The Fine Art of Being Imperfect,” in 1996. Apparently the Irish pastor never wrote out his sermons, but rather scribbled down a few notes and extrapolated on the ideas as he stood before his flock.
To make his point about the varying human responses to imperfection, Boyd uses three examples: Waterford crystal, pottery, and oriental rugs. At Waterford, Boyd explains, each piece of crystal is meticulously inspected, held up to the light, each surface appraised for the slightest crack or deformity. If any is spotted, the piece is immediately shattered. Boyd allows this imagery to sink in, allows the listener to picture the beautiful crystal being smashed against a hard object, the pieces swept away, punishment for a defect nearly invisible to the human eye. Then Boyd urges us to consider the slight space between these two wildly different outcomes. He says, “Notice how close perfection is to despair.”
Then he moves on to pottery. As a potter’s hands move over clay, shaping the malleable form, occasionally a mistake is made, an unwanted alteration to the vision. But usually the potter will not throw away the clay; she will attempt to reshape the piece around the mistake, as if it had never happened.
Then Boyd turns to the weavers who create the world’s most beautiful rugs. They spend hours creating designs by hand, and during this painstaking process the shapes and angles often become lopsided, asymmetrical. However, this asymmetry is not considered a mistake to be eradicated or smoothed out. In fact, it is the opposite: this imperfection becomes the rug’s beauty, its uniqueness. This rug is unlike any other, and that is what makes it a coveted work. Boyd’s message asks a single question of his listeners: In which way do we view imperfection?
And, again: Notice how close perfection is to despair.