Part I. Choices.
Every day, in every moment we are presented with choices.
Seemingly simple ones like what time to wake up, what to wear that day, and what to eat for breakfast. While simple, these choices each stack upon one another minute after minute, hour after hour, and day after day, to create the life we live. This post is not about those habit stacking daily choices.
Today’s post is about the choices that become life altering in the moment the choice is made. Ones that alter timelines and transform our physical realities. Choices like, what job to take, what partner to marry, and where to live. The kind of choices that in the act of a commitment, can ricochet emotions throughout your whole body because they feel that monumental.
I am working on a new poem about these kinds of choices.
I have recently reread for probably the fourth time the book, “What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen”. It is the story of Maddy Holleran, a beautiful soul, dazzling student, elite athlete, who took her life by suicide in 2014 at the age of 19, when she was a freshman at University of Pennsylvania. My intention this month was to honor Maddy’s story during May for Mental Health Awareness Month with a new poem. And after a few writing workshops, diving into Maddy’s story deeper, and counseling with the ears of good friends, I realized the poem coursing underneath the surface of mental health and suicide I felt called to write, was a poem about - choices.
I first read What Made Maddy Run, back in 2017 when it came out while getting my doctorate and since, have never been able to leave Maddy’s story behind. Because I remember when I read it for the first time feeling how Maddy’s story, was my story. I related to the compounding weight Maddy placed on herself as a high achiever and someone who has a difficult time navigating an unknown future. I used to control every ounce of what I could so that the future would seem less abstract and more concrete - something that I could hold in my hands. This unknown created debilitating anxiety in my life. And it has only been over the last few years that I have been able to loosen the grips of a future I want to look like and surrender into one of a more powerful divine force and trust in God’s plan for my future.
I really can’t say enough about the care that the Author Kate Fagan took to recount Maddy’s story. Kate shares, “When we read Maddy’s story, we feel that we know her. Many of us are Maddy, but for the grace of a few decisions or moments of support that placed us on a different path, to a different outcome.” And I couldn’t relate more.
As I reread Maddy’s story this time, seven years later, the researcher in me, took a highlighter to the pages. Here are some of the quotes that hit me with a punch in the gut.
“Maddy needed to see if she could really get into the Ivy League, which was a dream of hers. Or rather, a dream she felt she was supposed to have.”
“What if what she wanted and what she thought she thought she was supposed to want were opposed? And what if this gap between her head and her heart happened again?”
“Maddy was addicted to progress, to the idea that her life would move in one vector - always forward, always improving - as opposed to the hills and valleys, the sideways and backward and upside down that adults eventually learn to accept as more closely resembling reality.”
“Very little else in our society is rewarded as athletics are. And when you’re young, the distinction between an activity that truly satisfies your soul and one that merely brings accolades is difficult to parse. For many, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. For others, sports are actually not their passion, a realization that doesn’t come until they’re put into the fire of college sports. But admitting ambivalence of this kind can feel like considering filing for divorce the day after a wedding: everyone involved has already invested so much time and money. And hadn’t you convinced yourself you were truly in love?”
“Often quitting is a mistake. So much is learned through perseverance. … But more often, if student-athletes push through the discomfort of their first year, they grow stronger, and later, those thoughts of quitting come to seem like notions of someone else entirely. They end up being thankful for the coach who saw a different path, one that kept them steadily directed towards their goal. How does a coach know which athletes to let walk away and which ones to fight for? They don’t; they can’t.”
“She could not get her body to do what her heart and mind asked of it.”
I can look back and see how reading Maddy’s story was a catalyst that propelled me to begin my wheels turning for my business Inward Athlete. Helping athletes uncover the right path can sometimes require a dismantling of an ego that athletes have built upon their whole lives as the foundation for which they stand upon. Then when it begins to crumble, they are left asking themselves, “who am I now?” followed by an emotional rollercoaster of what it takes to let something go.
I continue to slowly build Inward Athlete and resources to help the archetype athletes like Maddy, like myself, who need support in tuning into their Soul’s path and allow oneself the permission for the Soul’s path to be the right path to walk even when the evidence of societal conditioning and cultural expectations tells us something else. Inward Athlete will save lives and for that - I must keep going no matter how long it takes me to build.
Over the last few years, I have bolstered my own trust muscle in my Soul’s path. And in the last few weeks a new choice has presented itself to me. One that did (still does not) make any logical sense but one that I have felt with my whole body was the Soul’s path calling me forward into a completely new experience.
To be continued…
Part II. will be shared on Sunday, May 12th.
Thank you for being here.