I’ve been watching many videos of Chester Bennington since his suicide last week. In one interview, he points an index finger at his temple and tells a radio host:
“When I’m inside myself, I’m in my own head. This place right here. This skull, between my ears. That is a bad neighborhood. I should not be in there alone. I need–I cannot be in there by myself.”
The radio hosts laughs and says, “What do you mean?”
His nonchalant response comes off as insensitive only because Chester did end up killing himself. I don’t fault the radio host; Chester even smiled through it to keep the interview conversational. Thoughts like Chester’s are only classified as symptomatic once it’s too late.
I browsed the comments section of this interview and found many people who could not understand:
- “Must be so tough having a millionaire musician lifestyle.”
- “There are people who have it way worse.”
No amount of wealth or privilege or even love guarantees invincibility from mental illness, or for those who are slow to pull the medical trigger, mental turmoil.
This kind of turmoil has nothing to do with what you have or don’t have. It’s not about counting your blessings or being grateful. It’s a state of “being” so far removed from how you actually live.
You can have a good job and generous cash flow, success and power, a fulfilling side hustle, family and faith, a community of friends to the point of social suffocation, attention and admiration from strangers, and those nice shiny shoes in the window.
It is possible to have all the conditions of happiness without feeling any of it.
Chester spoke of self-inflicted pain and being inside of himself, the internal struggle. When people asked what’s wrong, what happened today? I imagine he thought:
Well, there’s no immediate threat. The neighborhood is just unsafe.
One Matchbox Twenty lyric that always stuck with me is: “I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell. I know right now you can’t tell.”
Unwellness.
The state of being not okay.
People talk about the symptoms of depression as being cries for help. Save the ones in rough waters, flailing their arms for a life ring.
But that’s not what it looks like. Oftentimes, we can’t tell. Depression comes in all forms like a liquid taking the shape of a vessel, or rather, a host. Depression doesn’t discriminate. The extrovert is as susceptible as the introvert. The happy are no safer than the sad.
We’re suppose to lend a hand and a listening ear. Reach out to me if you have no one else. Talk to me.
But how do we know who to save when nobody looks like they’re drowning? It’s sunny. Hot sand, plastic coolers, colorful towels. Nobody actually dies at the beach because we all came here to swim.
So we swim.
Even when it feels like we’re not moving at all. Standing waist-deep in room temperature water, existing in two wildly different states that feel exactly the same. Whether we’re planted on our own two feet or bottom up, nostrils bubbling underwater, legs forked up like antennas from a calm, glass surface.
Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
If you hate talking on the phone like me, you can also reach Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741. https://www.crisistextline.org/