Goodbye Chester Bennington

Ynlay
Ynlay
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

I was only 10 years old when I first heard Linkin Park in one of those old school World of Warcraft compilation videos. As the music started playing I got almost instantly hooked into it. I stopped watching the video, and started searching for the name of the song, as the music was playing in the background.

I Looked in the comments…looked in the description of the video, but there was no mention of it. The chorus however was what gave it away. “In the end it doesn’t even matter” was what I typed in the Youtube search bar and got greeted immediately with what I was searching for.

From that point on, I would listen to Linkin Park and Disturbed and other great bands that I had discovered at the time, first thing as I came home from school. Having to endure these long hours, literally wasting my time, learning things I no longer remember and probably never even put to good use, none that I remember at least. Coming home and listening to music while playing video games was my escape from the real world. A world that I honestly did not want to be a part of at the time.

Before I knew it, highschool got harder, as was expected, things were not going any better, my grades were not improving, bullied and barely having any friends, the only thing that kept me going was the time that I was spending alone, home, listening to music and playing videogames. Suffice to say I was very antisocial. I felt like my time home was more productive than the time I was spending in the outside world, at school.

School kept feeling like a horrible place, I was no longer listening to the teachers, haven’t been doing so for a long time. Instead I was in my own head, disconnected from everything else around me. Daydreaming and thinking of what I was going to do when I finally got home. All the while constantly thinking that none in this classroom would ever even notice if I wasn’t there anymore, not even the teacher.

In all this seemingly endless torture, Chester Bennington was there. Not telling me that things will be okay, like many friends and people who do not feel the same way will tell you if you ever tried to open up to them. He was there alongside me, almost as if he were holding my hand through it all, confirming my deepest fears, that things are not okay, and probably won’t be okay for a long time. His cry for help in his songs, his anger and frustration at the world, were things that I could feel, and I would sing along as he was singing about his own experience with being depressed and generally being a mess.

I found great strength in knowing that there is another person out there, that fights his demons, that channels his frustrations to create things, to help other people like him. Perhaps not everyone got the same feeling that I did as I was listening to him, but the words in Chester’s songs have a great impact, on an emotional level. Chester felt what he was singing, from the first album all the way to the last.

Surely many can argue that their nu-metal days were gone for some time now, but the songs still had impact…they had a purpose, maybe some of the meaning was masked behind the different music playing in the background, but the lyrics were still all about depression, sadness and pain.

When the news about Chester’s suicide came up, I was heartbroken on so many levels. Being told that the person that was there for me, holding my hand, in my as of yet darkest days lost his war against his own depression, was, and still is, hard news to accept.

At first I thought that, if he ended up losing this war, what hope does any other person have? But later I realized that, Chester did not get out of his dark place, he stayed there, he helped many of us get out of there, but he never got out of this horrible place himself. He was only human in the end.

“When my time comes
Forget the wrong that I’ve done
Help me leave behind some
Reasons to be missed
And don’t resent me
And when you’re feeling empty
Keep me in your memory
Leave out all the rest “

Linkin Park — Leave out all the rest

I think many of us can agree that this is but one of many posts about Linkin Park and Chester Bennington, but I felt obliged to pay respects to a man that has helped me so much through my teenage years and has contributed into shaping me, to who I am today.

Rest in Peace Chester Bennington, In the end you mattered.

Chester Bennington 1976–2017
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