Suicide Awareness and a project proposal for Linkin Park in memory of Chester Bennington

This month is suicide awareness and prevention month and it is a verysensitive month for me in a number of ways. I have not lost anyone close to me due to suicide yet, but even more importantly, I have dealt with suicidal thoughts myself first hand. I want to talk about this before I go any further, before anyone thinks I'm just taking advantage of the issue to draw attention to myself,the truth is I have thought about suicide several times throughout my life, the absolute worst was October 18, 1999. I do not want to go into details about why that was such a bad day for me, just be assured I seriously actually wanted to kill myself twice that day. First I spent about an hour thinking about throwing myself out of a third story window, and the only reason I didn't was that I had an uncle who was paralyzed from a comparable fall and I was afraid that would happen to me; to be clear I just said I wasn't afraid of death, I was afraid of not dying and just having to live an even worse life. Later my day got worse and considered taking sleeping pills, enough that I wouldn't wake up. I don't have any real reason why I didn't take the second option, other than cowardice, I was just too afraid of dying or screwing up and having to live with the consequences. Since then I still think about suicide, wondering if I was wrong to live and maybe I should die. I get by on a combination of the same cowardice that kept me going that day and setting silly little goals that don't really matter but gives me just enough time to get through the day, finishing a book, waiting for a movie to premiere, playing a video game, going to a festival or concert or other event that only happens once so I know I have to go do that. Part of me knows that most of them don't matter, but that's the problem, I always feel like none of it matters, like I don't matter. I am sharing this so that you all can understand the mentality of someone who has suicidal thoughts so if you have someone close to you, you can help them by reminding them that they matter to you. Do not make them feel worse, no matter how much the thought of suicide makes you mad, they are dealing with something you may not quite get and until you do understand, just show them love.

Part two of this post is the slightly more self serving part, but still relevant, the death of Chester Bennington last year. There have been a nmber of high profile suicides, but this one hit me hard because Linkin Park was really influential on my work on 7th Moon. I listened to their music while I wrote, I was partly inspired by some of their songs, in one draft I named chapters after songs that were most influential and relevant, and most of all, I actually wanted to collaborate with Linkin Park to make a project setting 7th Moon to their songs. The death of Chester Bennington means this will never happen the way I imagined it, he will never be there to join me in the studio to make any original songs for this project, he will not be there to discuss it with me, he will never see the final project, and I will never be able to share those memories with him because he is gone. I can still talk to the other members of Linkin Park and maybe they will agree to work with me on this project, but it will never be the same, there will always be a hole there where Chester was and none of us will feel like it's complete without him. With this in mind, I do not want the dream to die with him, I want to animate 7th Moon setting each chapter to a Linkin Park song and I want to dedicate the whole thing to Chester Bennington, and if I do manage to make any money off of it I want to contribute all of it to suicide prevention in Chester's name, and I promise that a portion of any other profits from 7th Moon in any other form after that will also go to the same charity. You can see my proposed playlist here.