Rerouted Through the Police Station
Mary Lou was 16 when she won a gold medal — a big one — the first of its kind for an American. I was 11, staring at her face on a Wheaties box. She was a member of President Bush’s fitness council. I later became a member of my high school’s student council. Not quite the same.
Safe to say, we had nothing in common — until now. Two weeks ago, she got an OUI.
Now we’re distant cousins.
She’s not the first gold medalist with an OUI. Michael Phelps got two. President Bush (the 2nd one) got one, and so did his pal Dick Cheney. Charles Barkley’s OUI was pretty famous – or at least his explanation of it was. And Nancy Pelosi’s hubby. He got in on it. This shows three things: the people we’d expect to get off sometimes don’t, the drinking issue is an issue for all walks of life, and some can recover from the OUI experience. Definitely, the rich and famous can recover from them. TBD for the rest of us.
She won the Gold by like a decimal point - could only be accomplished by a day of perfection
Is Mary Lou still famous, though? I haven’t seen her around in a while. Her peak was 41 years ago. I told my son, Mary Lou got an OUI – he had NO clue who she was. I told him it was my generation’s Simone Biles. Why’d I tell him, and why would I think he’d care? Does the fact that our Cold War soldier, the one who showed Romania what Red, White, and Blue’s version of Nadia looks like, drank and drove mean anything? Well, it did to me – stupidly – but it did.
With Mary Lou’s fame and fortune, Phelps, with his, Tiger, the rest of them – you gotta wonder what anxiety looks and feels like for them. Anxiety and stress – they are chemical, and scientific. It’s our body screaming at us that we are in danger – even when we aren’t. It’s too real and too true for too many people. A single mom pulls into the grocery store and, upon walking in, knows that she needs $190 worth of groceries – a feat that must be accomplished with only the $88 she has left this week. Her anxiety and stress are of the how do I feed these kids variety.
Prob not an issue for Mary Lou. Her anxiety is different these days – and it’s gotta suck just the same…if not worse. She lives in Texas, and I’m writing about her circumstances here in Massachusetts. I have one reporter chasing me around. She has FOX and CNN. The little angel that flew and flipped as if she had wings – America’s sweetheart has been reduced to a mugshot. Now she’s gotta wake up every morning and look at it. Her kids have to look at it. Her kids’ friends, her kids’ friends’ parents – she feels like the America that loved her laughs at her – now that’s a different type of anxiety.
Whatever it was that landed her behind the wheel with a bottle of wine on her seat – if it were stress or anxiety – the very thing she was running from is really going to have her now. If it was a bad night – the kind that we just have as humans, it just became a bad year. If she didn’t have anxiety, she sure as hell has it now.
I hate that there’s an America that loves this – this lady’s pain is like their chocolate bar.
Imagine getting paid millions just to talk crap about people
They eat it up. The fall from grace. The “can you believe?” commentary on morning talk shows from people who’ve never missed a mortgage payment or sat alone in a car wondering what the hell went wrong. And while they gossip, the rest of us try to hold it together with paper clips and old affirmations.
I didn’t think much about anxiety until it started living in my chest. Not renting its space, owning it. It’s the voice that tells you you're blowing it — even when you're not. It’s waking up at 3 a.m. with your heart pounding over a conversation you haven’t even had yet. It’s feeling like you forgot something — something big — but you can’t name it.
And then people say, “try deep breathing” or “go for a walk,” as if the walk will feed your kid, erase your mistake, or cancel the court date. Oh, and they offer advice — like they’re handing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Since the beginning of all of this – years now – “This too shall pass” has been said to me like a thousand times. Those words are NOT true, actually. Stuff like this doesn’t pass – ever.
Your divorce, your arrest, your job loss. Foreclosures, bankruptcies, deaths of loved ones – the events pass for sure. The diagnosis you beat, the one you don’t – they don’t pass, ever. They become a part of you, shaping who you are now – or what you’ll become. And what about all of the anxiety? Where does that go?
Anxiety is energy with nowhere to go, actually. It’s momentum in a cage. And yeah, maybe that’s why we drink. Or scroll. Or rage. Or drive when we shouldn’t.
It’s not an excuse. But it is an explanation — for some of us. I imagine Mary Lou will start talking soon – hopefully in her own words, rather than through her publicists and lawyers.
I’ve been told that anxiety is wasted potential. That it’s all the things we could be doing, trying to escape through our ribcage. And when I think about that? Damn. It lands. The first time I heard it, that one, I went silent. It hurt to hear. Hurts to know. Taking pills and drowning an energy that could be elsewhere placed – feels like losing something important.
That pain could just be your potential finding a place to hide?
Because I’ve wasted a lot of potential. I’ve stood still when I should’ve moved. I’ve hidden when I could’ve stepped up. I fired missiles when silence and patience were the wiser answers. I’ve boozed it up when I should have had the vulnerability to cry.
So maybe that’s where I meet Mary Lou — not in medal count, but in the human mess.
Underneath her Olympic polish, beneath my public service sheen, we’re both people who got lost in the noise. People who tried to outrun the quiet — and wound up rerouted through police stations on the way home.
Maybe anxiety isn’t weakness. Perhaps it’s a compass — a jagged, painful one — pointing toward what we’re capable of becoming.
As tough as it is, I gotta be guided by that compass now. Mary Lou, where are you at?
Feel free to jump in on this.
I am sure she gets that one all the time.