What Chester Bennington meant to me.

Siddharth Pandit
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

I got to know about Chester’s death while I was sitting in the office browsing through the google news feed. I didn’t feel anything at that moment. Probably there was already a lot going on inside my head with work and thoughts about radical career change. The fact that I had not been following Linkin Park since the last one year did not help either. It was not before I came back home and read about the whole episode that the gravity of the situation started to sink in. It was no ordinary death or a mysterious murder. He took his own life. It was not spontaneous. Suicide never is. Something had been eating him from the inside for far too long until it reached a point where he felt he had only one option. I know what it feels like to stand on the edge of a gorge and feel compelled to take that last step forward. I have been there, more than once. A voice calls me out, telling me that there is nothing worth living, even dying for, that there is nothing that I can offer to the world, or the world to me, that I’m hollow and that there’s only one way to end this creeping emptiness, forever. Interestingly even though this voice is inside my mind, it has been fed by external factors, mostly things I have little or no control on. I have been through times when I strongly felt that nobody cares what I feel, that everybody wants a piece of me to feed their own aspirations and interests, that it’s only they who matter and I have to live with this harsh truth, or I can go for the alternative.

Chester was a celebrity, famous and most probably rich. He had a family to look after. He wasn’t even a fading star. LP are still going strong, with multiple shows lined up. What then, drove Chester to such a point. Maybe we’d never know for sure. This underscores an important truth: Fame and money can never be the sole means to inner peace and happiness. In the end, we all have to deal with the demons inside, fed in most cases by external entities under no control of ours.

Till 2008, I had limited access to the outside world. It was only newspaper and a publicly owned news channel. I didn’t listen to the radio much. We got a computer in January 2009 when I was just about to turn 15. That was the time when the very first cycle of major changes in life had started. I was heading into a precarious phase of life: teenage. The realisation that childhood and the freedom it endows is beginning to decline had already dawned on me. Friends I used to play with in my street had shifted elsewhere. I was soon to be in class 10 which culminates in a grand spectacle of country wide exams, performance in which had a direct bearing on one’s parents pride in their social groups.

Class 10 came and went. I underperformed. I had got used to little or no sports activity, with coaching and school eating up bulk of time. It was during the summer break after the board exams that I first heard a LP track: Points of Authority. It used to play this one track on full volume to appear “cool”. Life had become radically different. I had to juggle school and coaching. Teenage had started to cast its spell on me. I had lost track. My grades fell abysmally low. Besides,problems at home kept recurring time and again.I felt subjugated and helpless. There was no one who I could reach out to, who could help me solve my problem. My self esteem sank.

Sometime in late Jan 2011, I heard In the End and Numb. I was hooked to the music instantly. I found an outlet for the frustration and anger in Chester’s screams. When I read the lyrics, the songs resonated with me even more. I was especially touched by the plight of that girl in the video of Numb. Being mocked for being different was something which I had experienced first hand and I felt that a lot more people needed to understand her better. I felt the lyrics told my own story. These thoughts were inside me and these songs had now brought them out, giving words to what I had been feeling for long. Inadvertently, I had discovered a precious gift from Chester, the healing power of music.

So, during lunch breaks in school, when other kids were busy having fun with their friends, I sat alone at my desk, writing and rewriting the lyrics of In the End and Numb, while playing them in my head, feeling them deeply at that very moment. Then college happened. I had by then discovered bands and genres, but whenever I felt I that I had seething anger and frustration at the way things were going, I turned to Chester’s vocals for refuge. But never did it occur to me that he wrote what he felt intensely. That he had had bouts of crippling depression. That he too was alone in a crowd. Listening to LP was my outlet for the negative, little did I realize that making that music was Chester’s outlet too. That Chester and I have a connect on a deeper level. Now that he is gone, I am overcome by a sense of belonging and sadness of his loss.

Chester had poured out his feelings loud and clear in all songs he wrote and the music he created. The signs were there in every damn song. Had we looked beyond what his music offered to us and thought about why he wrote what he wrote, we might have known that Chester had another side to him, a deep and dark soul, which many of us too share. Things could have been different then, maybe.

I have felt LP’s music deeply in the past. From now, I will find it hard to overlook the new perspective that would hit me in the face when I listen to these songs again. I will find it hard to ignore the cry of a man pouring his heart out, letting the world know of the abyss he finds himself in and feel gutted at the sense of powerlessness that would engulf me, with the realization that he is gone and there is nothing that can bring him back. From now on, LP’s music takes on a new meaning for me.

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