So I had a former friend who used to make commentary like this, on my life and other peers’ lives. A couple of weeks after I’d run the second marathon of five I would eventually run over a span of two years, she said over dinner to me, seemingly casually, “I’d like to do something extraordinary with my life, you know? Like, take marathoning — that’s great, but that’s ordinary. Now road-tripping around India in a rickshaw (a friend of ours was doing this), that’s extraordinary.” And then continued talking like what she’d just said wasn’t a thing. Now I’d spent months training for that race, and she knew it: I’d gone for 10 milers through Central Park in blizzard conditions, I’d woken up at 4:30am to time-trial myself at shorter races in Prospect Park to make sure I was on track with my sprint conditioning, I’d ruled out Fridays for going out in the city because I had my weekly training run with my team at Nike on Saturdays. I’d busted my ass for months for that marathon, and despite a slower finish time than I wanted I was really proud I had done it.

My former friend didn’t make that comment to be helpful in guiding me towards better real life ambitions, in other words. She said it purely to put a dent in my happiness about what I’d just achieved. And that’s the only purpose this comment appears to have meant to serve. I’m involved enough in the writing world to spend meaningful time in any given year thinking about or discussing with other writing peers the “literary merits” of pieces we’ve just read; typically, when giving criticism about the “literary merits” of a work, one expands on one’s point in order to legitimize that commentary — to use the above-referenced comment’s own terminology for this case, ways to make this piece less “personal” and “much” if indeed these were genuine faults — otherwise this kind of comment tends to be perceived as a meaningless ding that, ironically, itself has no value. This kind of critical engagement is thus a way of demanding that the critiquer really place their own skin in the game in this interaction too, and to take just as much of a risk with the presentation of their perceptions as the original author did in writing and sharing their work. Which of course is not what happened here, but as the original commenter appears to feel their opinion carries some weight, it seemed worth it to follow this exercise through to the end of that rabbit hole, however vacuous.

I grew up in a similar religious environment to Ms. Ashley, and this story knocked me over with its truth, depth and vulnerability. Though I have written about it many times I have not yet had the courage to publish any of those writings; it is still a part of my past I am grappling with and, frankly, am still angry for having lost so much time and sanity to. There were many places in her work for which I had to stop and step away for a minute because it felt too close to home; I take that as a sign of the authenticity of the feelings and experiences described as well as the precision with which they were written, and as far as I am concerned this is literary merit of the highest order. And as the reason I even discovered this piece is because it had been placed at the top of the “Featured” section, which happens solely as a result of the Medium editing team’s decisions for front-page content, I am demonstrably not the only person who feels this way. Thank you, Ms. Ashley, for giving us the gift of your story; I hope that it both helps others as they continue to wade out of that darkness, and inspires them — maybe even me, one day — to tell their own truths about this experience.