I woke up at 6am (4pm US) and I hit snooze on the alarm. I just wasn’t ready to face the day and was so ready to have the week come to an end that I just wanted to be in bed a few moments longer.
It’s been a shit week. My dearest, closest friend and soul sista lost her father. In being there for her, I realized my own experience with my mama’s death could help begin her healing process. Work is stressful and at times headache inducing. I’ve also finally come to the point where I realize that the man I fell in love with and am in love with has friend zoned me so hard to the back of the line on another planet that I have no choice to think of him as “flat front Ken doll” (to know him as a friend with the hope of nothing more). I fought this reality for as long as I could as I thought he was it, the twin flame, my person but my soul was wrong.
Then Twitter started dinging on my phone and it kept going and going. I instantly thought, who’s on Twitter liking everything?
I checked the notifications. Retweets galore on a suicide hotline number. Then I saw “your tweet has been added to a moment”: Linkin Park star Chester Bennington has died aged 41.
Not the Twitter moment I hoped to be added to, but one I am honored to be added to.
Reports say Chester committed suicide.
Legions of Linkin Park fans mourn his death. He never claimed to be a messiah but for LP fans his voice, his words, his music was their savior.
I’ve battled depression and still do. At times “The On Coming Storm” (what I call depression arising in my life) can be seen slowly moving across the sky and I can prepare for the battle. Then there days (or in this case, this week), where the storm is just there when you wake up one day and each day the storm clouds get worse and worse. Black and blacker. I can barely survive each day.
I have seen the seductive side of suicide. The “complete clean slate”. The ending of pain. The ending of the heartache, the mental battle between heart, mind, and soul.
God, it paints such a pretty picture of peace.
A false sense of release and ending pain.
I have contemplated suicide. I have held the knife in my hand and against skin. I have stared at the bottle of pills and booze.
The thing with suicide, it makes it look so easy and so freeing.
Living and being alive is worth the battle. It’s not easy but goddamn it is so worth every scar, wound, tear, and heartache.
I sat on the train and bus talking to strangers on Twitter, crying tears with them as they shared their stories with me and I with them. The overwhelming love and support of strangers reaching out to others saying “I am there for you” and “Let me be there for” is a beautiful thing.
I wrote the following haiku in honor of Chester.
Do thoughts of suicide still cross my mind? Occasionally, but I can’t give up. I have souls to inspire and help. I have nieces I want to see thrive. I have a soul sista that needs a shoulder to lean on and a man that I will always love that needs me even if only as a friend.
I will always battle the darkness.
The darkness will never win.
Chester sang in the song, “In the End”
“…I kept everything inside
And even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me
Will eventually be a memory of a time when
I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter…”
Truth be told, in the end, it does matter.
You never give up.
Please don’t give up.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVTXPUF4Oz4?ecver=1]