It’s almost startling to watch Simone Biles, of all people, reach for the word “dying.” This is a woman who has been defying gravity for twenty years, who has a skill on the uneven bars named after her, who left Tokyo in the middle of a competition and managed to make it appear like strength rather than retreat. Therefore, it was not the typical celebrity health update when she revealed that she had been on the verge of death in that flat, unadorned way people write when they’re still processing something. She provided scant details. A picture of her wristbands…
Author: Michael Martinez
Every morning, she was the first person in the office. At midnight, she responded to emails. She attended every school play, kept track of everyone’s birthdays, and never, ever let anyone see her cry. She appeared to be someone who just had it together from the outside. She had been silently drowning inside for more than ten years. This is not an uncommon tale. Roughly one in five people born in 1970 had the highest levels of psychological distress of their lives in their 40s and 50s, according to a UCL study that followed over 28,000 adults across several generations.…
The NHS Health Check has a subtle peculiarity. A free, organized examination of your blood pressure, weight, blood sugar, and cardiovascular risk is one of the health service’s most sensible offerings. The issue is that you can’t get one until you’re forty years old. The system simply has nothing formal to offer you if you are 34, 36, or 38 years old, working long hours, eating poorly, and silently ignoring the fatigue that never quite goes away. By design, you are not a priority just yet. Every five years, adults between the ages of 40 and 74 are invited to…
Making your first therapy appointment at age 35 can cause a certain level of embarrassment. It’s not the kind you’d readily acknowledge, but it’s there—a subtle, background sensation that you’ve somehow missed something that everyone else has figured out for years. One day at lunch, a coworker casually brought up her therapist, much like you would bring up a dentist. Since her mid-twenties, she had been going. That landed strangely for some reason. However, when you’re sitting in that waiting room for the first time, feeling a little overdressed and slightly convinced that you’re doing this incorrectly, no one tells…
There is a specific type of fatigue that no blood test can detect. Around 33 or 34, it shows up with the face of a typical person. You have a job. Maybe in a partnership. functional in every way that matters to the public. However, there is a persistent low hum of barely managing—the Sunday-night anxiety, the sudden irritability, and the nagging feeling that you are handling everything while barely appreciating it. There isn’t a crisis here. It is more subdued and, in a sense, more difficult to deal with. The decade that most people spend acting as though they…
Living rooms in America and Britain are experiencing something subtly contradictory. Millennial parents, who are arguably the most emotionally intelligent, research-focused, and genuinely committed generation of parents in history, are witnessing their kids experience anxiety at rates that would have shocked their own parents. Anyone who is paying attention can see the irony. These individuals grew up with dial-up internet and experienced two recessions as adults. They already carried that burden into parenthood, with documented anxiety, record levels of burnout, and a deep-seated fear of repeating what had been done to them. They read the books as a result. They…
There is a certain cruelty in timing: an illness can strike right when everything you’ve worked for is finally coming together, rather than during a quiet period. Jayne Kennedy experienced that. She was one of the most well-known figures in fitness media in the early 1980s, coexisting peacefully with Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda as a key figure in the wellness movement of the time. One of her best-selling books was Love Your Body. She was watching it take off after writing it, producing it, and organizing every detail of its launch. She was then unable to perform a sit-up…
The way Josh Gad’s weight has followed his career—rising and falling in tandem with the roles Hollywood has chosen to give him or withhold—is almost too neat. For years, the Frozen star carried his size in a way that only some actors can: with humor, charm, and a kind of self-awareness that put everyone else at ease before they could become uncomfortable. Up until it broke down, it operated flawlessly. Gad relied on his size for many of the jokes that characterized his early career, building his early reputation on the chubby best-friend archetype. That’s simply a category Hollywood created…