Thinking about Chester Bennington... (Patreon)

Just a warning, super heavy post.I drew Ellie crying and shouting to the world in pencil.I really wanted to convey the desperation and frustration on her face.I've been spending a lot of time writing up psychological analysis of people's lives, certain cases of suicide, true crime stories, and serial killers, to exercise my knowledge about how humans function. I want to continue to understand how they are traumatized (I firmly believe we all have been to varying degrees) and what their behavior says about what they may have experienced in early development. It's to help me better understand myself as a human being and I hope to do my own feelings justice as I create new art this year.---I started to think about Linkin Park again after getting recommended a youtube video of someone sitting in their room and venting to the camera about their life. I looked at their archive and saw a video where they talked about their favorite music. They mentioned Linkin Park and I decided to listen to them again after many years, namely the song 'Somewhere I belong.' I never looked into the lead singer's life until recently. I had a lot of negative feelings surrounding my youth and I didn't want to think about some "cringe" band, so I didn't realize he killed himself almost 10 years ago. I also realized how young he was when he died. You can blow through your 20s / 30s in a blink of an eye and 41 feels like you're only halfway there.I finally decided to look into what Chester's childhood was like and what sort of problems he wrestled with, because on the surface, it seemed like he had all the resources (money, family, friends, successful career, access to some of the best mental health specialists in the world) to contend with whatever issues he had in the past. I never knew how horrible his life had been prior to Linkin Park's success. I remember searching online "celebrities with a horrible childhood" a few weeks ago to see if there were people I could relate to (people who made more money later in life but still struggled with depression due to childhood trauma) and for whatever reason, his name never came up during my research.I learned that Chester was SA'd as a child by another childhood friend that was slightly older than him. He started doing drugs as an 11 year old to cope with the trauma because he was too afraid of not being believed or being called gay. His parents were both preoccupied with their careers and they eventually divorced. Mothers are usually given custody, but Chester lived with his father and he said that his father was emotionally unstable. So at age 17 he lived with his mother, but his mother found out about his drug use and isolated him, forcing him to stay at home. On January 23 2008, Chester said in a Kerrang! magazine interview with Tom Bryant “It was an awful time. I hated everybody in my family: I felt abandoned by my mom, my dad was not very emotionally stable then, and there was no-one I could turn to – at least that’s how my young mind felt. The only thing I wanted to do was kill everybody and run away.”This set the stage for what ultimately led to years of drug addiction and alcoholism, a failed marriage, struggles with fatherhood, and avoiding what he called "a bad neighborhood" in his mind. In an interview with 102.7KIISFM he said around the 9 min mark:“When I’m inside myself, when I’m in my own head, it gets...This place right here [points to his head] this skull between my ears, that is a BAD neighborhood and I am, I should NOT be in there alone. I need...I can’t be in there by myself. It’s insane. It’s crazy in here. This is a BAD place for me to be by myself.” A lot of Linkin Park's songs involve self blame, wanting someone to take his feelings and problems seriously, and a strong desire to change. Chester seemed to think that by avoiding his traumatic memories and denying feelings of anger, sadness, desperation, and rejection--by constantly distracting himself and giving as much of himself as he could to others...Chester thought he could somehow change and be a better person for everyone else. In the same interview with 102.7KIISFM he said:“When I’m in that, like I get, I—my whole life gets thrown off. Like if I’m in there [his mind], like I don’t say nice things to myself. Like there’s another Chester in there that’s like—wants to take me DOWN...And I find that it could be, whether it’s substances, whether it’s behavior, or whether it’s like depressive stuff—whatever it is, if I’m not actively like doing, getting out of myself and being with other people like being a dad, being a husband, being a band mate, being a friend, helping someone out...If I’m out of myself, I’m great! If I’m inside all of the time, I’m horrible. I’m a mess.”The problem with his approach, with splitting off from your emotions and avoiding the very real things that negatively impacted you as a child, the painful feelings will persist because that's what the human body was designed to do. When you're wounded, emotions inform us of that wound. Some people can split off and live to the age of 100 with an immensely diminished quality of life where they're existing in this numb state of existence; others die young like Chester because they couldn't keep outrunning the pain.Continued from the same 102.7KIISFM interview:“That was kind of where ‘I don’t like my mind right now, stacking up problems that are so unnecessary’...That’s where that came from for me. That’s the moment where it’s like, realizing like—I drive myself nuts, like actually thinking that like these are real problems. Like all the stuff that’s going on here [points again to his head] is actually just—I’m doing this to myself.” “Whenever I’m in it, I just want to get out of however I’m feeling.” - Chester BenningtonMy reasons for avoiding Linkin Park, dismissing them as just some cringe emotional band, and refusing to look into Chester's reasons for committing suicide, is rooted in my struggle to take my own emotions and problems seriously. The saddest thing about Chester's death is that it could have been avoided. He could still be alive right now. Sure, I can't say that for certain, and I don't think it's anyone's place to tell people what to do with their own life, but he had children that weren't adults yet and now they've been forced to grow up without a father, and in such a tragic and public way--continuing the childhood trauma.Maybe things could have been different if he had taken his own feelings of childhood abandonment seriously instead of just assuming something was wrong with him. Nothing was wrong with him; he was wounded and needed to be healed, but he avoided looking too deeply within. If Chester was going to end his own life anyway, why not go to that bad neighborhood? Why not hold your parents and unsupportive family members accountable for not being there for you after you've already suffered so much? Why not scream that to the world instead of blaming yourself for everything? You're accountable for the things you've done as an adult, but nothing you experienced as a child was your fault!“It was an awful time. I hated everybody in my family: I felt abandoned by my mom, my dad was not very emotionally stable then, and there was no-one I could turn to – at least that’s how my young mind felt. The only thing I wanted to do was kill everybody and run away.”It wasn't just how his young mind felt--those feelings persisted until his death.I went back to read journals I wrote as a teenager and I often wrote about wanting to feel less and being burdened by my emotions because people told me to stop being so depressed and talking about my feelings. It was annoying to them and I didn't want to feel rejected by my "friends" since my family had already rejected me for it. On the rare occasion that I met with my father, he once mocked me for wanting to go to therapy, saying "Why do you need that? What's wrong with you?"Um, I don't know... Maybe because you abandoned me as a toddler, and threw a wrench at me when I cried out for your attention, and got angry after crushing my fingers in a door, and watched gorey horror films in front of me as a frightened child, and cheated on my mom and did a bunch of other fucked up, gross things? Maybe because my mother also did equally fucked up things to me too like hitting me with wooden utensils until it broke, allowing a "family friend" to grope me right in front of her, and exposing me to adult content when I was too young to be seeing that stuff while casually chatting with a girlfriend, bringing around her boyfriends to do sexual things with them while I was forced to sit in the other room, or using me as a puppet to live vicariously through me?I got treated a lot like Chester did throughout most of my life. People in my family and many others I met outside thought: "What's wrong with her? She's weird. She's so angry. She thinks too much. She's always by herself. She's always depressed." Thankfully I never turned to drugs or alcohol to cope, but I did emotionally split off and used food, entertainment, and self-harm to soothe me.I think this treatment of people's feelings and problems is very common, unfortunately. You can't just let things go. You can't just choose to forgive those that hurt you if that's not how you actually feel. You can't force yourself to stop feeling "bad." You can't keep punishing yourself for making mistakes and reacting to the horrible shit that's been done to you, expecting the depression to magically disappear. Yes, people do things that are destructive and cruel and callous and seemingly makes no sense when they've been hurt and they carry that pain with them without addressing it. We are responsible for our actions as adults, but we're not at fault for what's at the root of it.I firmly believe that the things we do as adults are rooted in our feelings in childhood and young adulthood. During our crucial developmental years, we continue to carry the things we feel for the rest of our life. And if we run away from them, distracting ourselves with work, sex, fantasy, family, hobbies, a career, exercise, intellectualization, even self-help can be a distraction depending on the actions necessary to take our problems seriously--our feelings will continue to weigh on us, and for many, it overwhelms us eventually.This is the lesson I learned while analyzing Chester Bennington's life. It's very tempting to run away from that "bad neighborhood" in our mind, and sometimes it's even necessary for survival during very fragile and vulnerable periods, but there is a very real and serious price to pay for a lifetime on the run.My favorite Linkin Park performances I've been listening to on repeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFWxHi7QSJ4