Madison Holleran was a young track athlete at the University of Pennsylvania who seemed to have a “perfect” life. She embodied all of our cultural ideals. She was smart, beautiful, athletic — as her carefully curated Instagram feed showed. But Madison tragically took her own life during her freshman year of college. I first met the Holleran family in the summer of 2014, six months after Madison’s death. They answered my calls and e-mails, passed along the cell phone number of every one of Maddy’s friends, and even granted me access to Maddy’s computer, including her documents, e-mails, and iMessages.

Even before I began learning about Madison, I had started the process of erasing myself from the present world in favor of social media—carving out chunks of myself, stretching them into an online skeleton: two people from one, like some kind of medical miracle. I had been doing this for a long time, of my own volition. In the past few years, I’ve spent almost as much time constructing and maintaining my online self as I have my real, human self. I’ve certainly spent more time on Instagram exercising my image than I have in the gym exercising my body.

These two presentations are not the same person; in fact, they are often two very different people. The online version is static, and therefore easily paused on perfection, because the conditions in that space allow it. The parameters of the actual world are expansive, and people can view you from any angle (literally and metaphorically), while online you need only fit yourself into a fixed box whose conditions you control and manipulate. The offline version of me is obviously deeply flawed, though it’s easy to start believing otherwise, because I spend so much time immersed in my online self. Online, I can create someone who is not impatient, does not misspeak, is not self-centered, is always standing in the best lighting, and on and on. The highlights of my life are posted in that space, and everyone reacts in predictable ways—that is, the ways I want them to. And sometimes it feels much easier to live in that reality than in the one where I am always flawed and challenged, and occasionally sad.

So what do these two versions of me have in common? Honestly, not much at all. I imagine this is true for almost everyone’s social persona, Madison included. One of the trickiest parts of social media is recognizing that everyone is doing the same thing you’re doing: presenting their best self. Everyone is now a brand, and all of digital life is a fashion magazine. While it’s easy to understand intrinsically that your presence on social media is only one small sliver of your full story, it’s more difficult to apply that logic to everyone else. Because you actually lived the full night, not just the two-second snapshot of everyone laughing, arms around shoulders. All you see of other people’s nights is an endless string of laughing snapshots, which your brain easily extrapolates to fantastic evenings filled with warmth and love, with good wine and delicious food. Comparing your everyday existence to someone else’s highlight reel is dangerous for both of you.

At the same time, existing online often feels less risky, less challenging, than existing in the real world, where things often become messy. Online, you can just plug in and edit everything. Plus, there is no body language that you’re forced to interpret. When you try to build a relationship in person, or meet a group of friends, you face the possibility of awkward pauses, confusing body language, and the disappointment of not saying precisely what you mean. In person, time moves steadily past and you either keep the rhythm of the interaction or you don’t. Online, there is only the artificial rhythm you create, the beat slowed down or sped up depending on what you choose. But that’s not quite dancing. Dancing is giving your body over to a larger energy. Dancing is finding the rhythm and beauty in whatever song is playing.

Before social media, we mostly interacted with each other in the bright light of day, where we all have so much less control over how we might look or seem. Now we spend hours a day consuming one another online. Moreover, digital natives have known only this reality. They have grown up on Instagram and Snapchat, absorbing hundreds of images a day. And most of these perfect pictures, loaded into boxes, reflect little of each person’s reality. We’re consuming an increasingly filtered world yet walking through our own realities unfiltered.

Maybe this matters less when life is good. Maybe when we’re in a good space, when we’re “happy,” it’s nice to launch social media and see how well everyone else is doing. The whole experience might feel like momentum, all this beauty and goodness gracefully stacking higher and higher. And when you’re in this place, you’re often rational, too, because your mind isn’t in fight-or-flight mode. Your pulse is low. Your thinking is clear. You’re able to recognize how edited so much of it is. But that’s okay, you tell yourself, because life is so good, and beautiful pictures and projected happiness are lovely.

But how often are we in that sane and safe place? And what about the rest of the time, when life is cloudy and gray, and getting out of your head is a struggle? Then what impact does the perfectly manicured landscape of social media have on our brains? A study of more than seven hundred college students by researchers at the University of Missouri found that Facebook could spark feelings of envy, which can lead to symptoms of depression. When you’re anxious and low, and out of habit (and addiction) you launch social media, it is unlikely that images of others will help you feel connected. Rather, they almost certainly further pry apart the space between you and everyone else, because you are not happy and everyone else seems to be.

Finally, after searching every crevice of Madison’s computer, I slowly moved the mouse to the dashboard and hovered over the blue iMessage icon. If someone accessed my iMessage file, they would find a blow-by-blow account of my days, as there are numerous people with whom I keep in pretty much constant contact. I’m also relatively forthcoming—at least with my close friends—about how I’m feeling. So while certain details are of course omitted (everyone has their secrets), the texts would provide a transparent view of my thinking, my mental state. I wondered whether Madison’s would provide the same.

I launched the application. Months and months of messages popped onto the screen. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed, as if I were staring into a cluttered garage with no idea where to find what I was looking for. Perhaps Maddy sent something meaningful a month ago to a friend she never texted again, an exchange buried beneath more recent interactions. I pictured a block of blue text, the words capturing everything going through Madison’s mind. Meticulous work would reveal this long-buried clue.

I started reading the conversations with her closest friends, those whose names I knew, because their communication happened to be more recent. Only a few minutes passed before I realized that I would not find anything insightful within Madison’s iMessage account. In fact, the most important realization I would arrive at was how superficial the medium could be. She sent thousands of messages, perhaps ten thousand words—and yet little was actually conveyed.

We have this idea that someone’s phone will reveal their life, that if you found an iPhone on the street you’d have access to photos, e-mail, notes, texts, videos, apps. Each of these would project an angle of light into the middle that would gradually illuminate a whole person. But the truth is nothing like that. The truth is that a phone will help you build something like a hologram, and if you tried to touch it, your hand would breeze right through the image.

Still, I looked through every last one of Madison’s messages. After about an hour of clicking on names, reading, then clicking out, I launched an exchange with another friend, and my hands froze over the keyboard. My heart banged inside my chest. There, in the text box, were five words Maddy had typed but never sent—hey, what are you doing—followed by a blinking cursor. It was the cursor that caused my heart to race. The thin line seemed to be alive, waiting for Madison’s next move, like a blinking red traffic light at which she was idling, looking both ways, considering where to go next.

I thought, Wow, this is like having Madison, right here in front of me.

But is it really?

Kate Fagan is a columnist and feature writer for espnW, ESPN.com, and ESPN The Magazine. She is the author of What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen.



