If anything, Shaun is more The Guy now than he was during Sochi. That’s where he got lost.

At Sochi, he tried to do something no snowboarder had ever done before—win gold in superpipe as well as slopestyle, an event in which competitors complete tricks through an elaborate obstacle course. He pulled out of slopestyle at the last minute—mostly because an ankle injury threatened to knock him out of both events—and then didn’t even medal in superpipe, crashing in one of his three heats and placing fourth.

This time around, no slopestyle for him. Reason being—he paused before saying it, taking a quiet moment to think—“I just decided to be kind to myself.”

Shaun told me that he had recently been reading a self-help book and taken some of its advice to heart. “I picked up this one in an airport, Being Happy!, or whatever, and it was just: ‘Be Happy.’ Literally, that is the first thing!” He laughed and added, “It sounds like such a blatant thing. And it’s so hard.”

He knows what you might think, looking at his life. How could this dude ever not be happy?

Well, around Sochi, he wasn’t. He’d lost his joy, and it was as if he were losing a superpower.

It happened quickly and seemed to come out of nowhere. He’d met his girlfriend, Sarah Barthel, not long before Sochi, and he was happy then. He made her happy, too. It was 2012, when Shaun was at peak Flying Tomato—he even still had his long red hair. “In a man bun,” Sarah remembered. Three years older than him, Sarah also remembered Shaun as “this wild child, just all over the place—in a good way.”

Shaun made her laugh, a lot, often by poking fun at himself.

Soon after he met Sarah, Shaun and another friend tried going backstage at Coachella to visit the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but they didn’t have passes, so a security guard stopped them. Shaun’s friend—perhaps intoxicated—shouted, “Come on! This guy’s AN AMERICAN HERO!”

The guard said, “You know what? You’re goddamn right he is!” and let them through.

Shaun told Sarah soon as he could. “It was the corniest thing!”

But with preparations for Sochi in 2013, away went that happy, wild, smart boy, chopping off his hair and seeming to take on the weight of the world in its place. “He took on this heaviness,” Sarah said. “There is a lot of emotion in Shaun in general.”

“I was tired and really frustrated,” he said.

People thought his music was what brought him down. He seemed to have become obsessed. During training, he spent all his free time playing the guitar, sometimes for hours into the night. The summer before Sochi, he even packed up and went on tour with his new band, Bad Things. “I felt like it was such a negative distraction for him,” Tony Hawk said.

Shaun actually agrees, in part: “It absolutely was a distraction,” he said. “But it felt like a necessary one.”

“Music is cathartic,” said Sarah, half of the electro-rock duo Phantogram. “It’s like therapy. It saves.”

Shaun was in pain of all kinds, the sort of pain created by ambition and driving it—the sort of pain that makes you feel like you just aren’t allowed to be happy.

His ankle hurt all the time, for starters. He first injured it in 2009 training for Vancouver by crash-landing into a foam pit as he perfected the Double McTwist 1260—the Tomahawk. One of the crashes was so hard and violent that he rolled over the top of his board with enough force to chip a piece of bone off the ankle.

“Just a small piece,” the doctor said then. “It’ll be fine.”

Ever since, he’s felt every hard landing for days after.

Shaun was also struggling with a new understanding of who the world expected him to be, and how different he felt he was from that expectation. “I started doing commercials that were zany,” he said. “I’m pretty calm, normally. I like to have fun. But not when someone’s like, ‘OK, dance! Be the clown for us!’ That got to me. I was like, Am I doing it for them? Or for me? Is this who I really am?”

As he began training for Sochi in the spring of 2013, even snowboarding started to feel that same sort of way. Social media gave him a window into what he was missing back home. On a mountain in the middle of nowhere, Shaun felt marooned with a cruel portal back into the reality he could be enjoying. He was sacrificing his personal life for his craft, and relationships were slipping and fading. He missed birthdays and Fourth of July parties and Saturdays at the beach. “You can see life going by,” he said.

Under the weight of all he was giving up, Shaun felt as if the only way to justify it was to go accomplish more. He convinced himself that “just” winning halfpipe again in Sochi wouldn’t be enough—that it wouldn’t be enough to become the only American to win three straight Winter Olympic gold medals. Hence, slopestyle. “He felt this need to do it,” Sarah said.

He’d won several X Games slopestyle golds, but completing the double at the Olympics was a different beast. “That was just too much,” he said.

There were many hard, lonely nights when Shaun didn’t know where his peace had gone and why his joy had followed it. Many of those late nights with the guitar, he was just wailing on it—if not until he felt happy, then at least until he felt the music more than the pain.

So, no. Music wasn’t the problem in Sochi. Music might have been the only thing that got him there. And because of music, he finally found the space he needed to figure out how to heal. To figure out it was OK to be kind to himself.