Chester Bennington taught me to scream

A tribute to the man who gave me a soundtrack for a difficult time.

When I heard, yesterday, of Chester Bennington’s passing, I felt a hollowness within.

Linkin Park’s music (especially their debut Hybrid Theory album) helped define a major inflection point in my life and growth. I’ve struggled with existential questions since childhood, and it only got more acute in my teenage years, but it was in my first year in medical school, on the cusp of my adulthood, that the growing question of whether my life had meaning was becoming more and more urgent.

Like a vampire without fear, questions that used to creep up on me on sleepless nights had started intruding into daylight.

The lyrics from the opening of Puddle of Mudd’s Blurry, which captured how I felt at the time, are forever etched in my memory:

Everything’s so blurry/And everyone’s so fake/And everybody’s empty/And everything is so messed up…

The sense of life’s meaninglessness was a crushing weight. Wasn’t it all a waste of time, this endless pursuit of goals and achievements and things, when in the end we would all die anyway? And then what? People would remember you? What would that even matter? What did any of it matter?

I often felt, then, like a piece of driftwood floating on the ocean of existence, with no land in sight. It was into this state of mind that Bennington’s powerful lungs first blasted into my ears.

In The End

Yes, this, their first single…

Blew.

Me.

Away.

It was perfect. I was already falling in love with angry music that captured these feelings that I didn’t know what to do with, but Bennington’s voice did them new justice: the haunting sound of his croons expressed my longings, the power of his screams articulated my anger and frustration. The insane guitar riffs, banging drums and actual rapping were only the icing on the cake. Perfect, I tell you.

—One Step Closer

And who can forget those lines, toward the end of One Step Closer, that weren’t sung but simply screamed, and which aptly captured what I wanted to say in many situations: “Shut up! Shut up when I’m talking to you!”

Papercut

Chester Bennington had faced a lot of difficulty when he wrote these songs, including sexual abuse, school bullying and parental divorce and drug dependence all before age 13. And he would live through a lot more in the years to follow. He wasn’t simply writing stuff to sell albums, he was sharing his personal struggles through his music. I didn’t even know this at the time — the internet was still very new then, mind you — but I didn’t need to: the honesty coming through in the music was too raw to not be real.

—Crawling

Music has often offered a soundtrack to my life. And Linkin Park provided the best some of the best sounds for this period of my life. I had family, but felt alone. I had friends, yet I felt lonely. I had questions whose very validity I was starting to question. I was confused about what mattered, adrift and searching for an identity to anchor myself to in a world that didn’t feel like it had space for me.

— Points of Authority

My searching eventually (story for another day) led me back to the childhood faith I had first started to question, then deliberately walked away from years earlier. I went back to practices I had abandoned: attending church, trying to pray and reading a Bible. It was in the last I discovered the following words…

—The Preacher (Ecclesiastes 2 ESV)

For the first time in my life, the Bible felt relevant to my actual experience, and to this day, there’s a special place in my heart for the book of Ecclesiastes. I found new hope, first through my newfound faith, and later through the music of another band, Switchfoot, and from a song that, when I first had it, left me speechless with how effectively it described my entire life up to that point in a few lines.

Beautiful Letdown

But even if they didn’t offer answers, I will never forget that it was Linkin Park who not only helped me ask the questions, but also more richly articulate the emotions that accompanied them. I think now of something CS Lewis said once, that when, in a group of three friends, one should leave or die, the other two would lose that in each other which only appeared as a response to the now-departed friend. Even though I didn’t know Bennington personally, and even though you could argue that what I did know of him, his music, hasn’t left me—yet I feel like I’ve lost something that I can’t quite describe yet.

Perhaps he took those words away too.

I’ve thought much since yesterday about some lines from a song about sexual abuse from that first album, voiced not by Bennington himself but by Mike Shinoda, who did the rapping for the band…

— Points of Authority

I don’t know—and maybe no one possibly could—what Bennington was going through that made him decide in his own way to “forfeit the game.” Perhaps the wounds crawling in his skin really never did heal. Perhaps the fear was how he fell, taking that one last step over the edge. We may never know.

But I know this much: by being open about his wounds, he showed us that we can be open about ours. And in the end, that matters.

If you’re going through stuff you need to share, you can call the following, depending where you are:

• NIGERIA: Suicide Prevention Initiative on +2348062106493 or Mentally Aware Nigeria +2348060101157
• UK: samaritans.org. Hotline: +44 (0) 8457 90 90 90 (UK) or 1850 60 90 90 (ROI). E-mail Helpline: jo@samaritans.org
• US: Click on your state.
• The rest of the world: check here.

Also, read this article I wrote to help you decide if you need to make that call:

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