Mental health #1

I made a bucket list when I was 23. It's hidden somewhere on a blog I used to maintain. If I remember the list, it had certain things that were important to a 23 year old me and included things like visiting the Effiel Tower and learning French etc. What was not a part of the list and still a dream was to see my favourite band perform live. I have grown up with the heart touching lyrics of linkin park. And I would be honest here, like every middle class Indian I grew from Bryan Adams, Enrique to finally graduate to linkin  Park. And I have this habit of always checking their tour schedule in a hope to see them perform live. Even my phone has the songs recorded from live performances. There's a different energy to live performances in my opinion.
But all of this became immaterial a few days back, as the lead singer of #LinkinPark , Chester committed suicide and selfishly I was angry. I was angry because I suddenly felt empty as if a life goal was snatched away from me. With fresh reports pouring in and all sites picking up the news, it's almost there on my feed everyday. And I have just one question why? LinkinPark would reply with "I don't know why". I fucking named my blog after the song. And all my close friends know that there are two things I force on every acquaintance who gets close to me, 1. Linkin Park 2. Fountainhead. So I somehow tried justifying my anger as a fan. Even if they find a new singer and they go on. It's not the same. Now that I have sufficiently taken out my frustrations at the news. Here's the bigger question in front of all of us. A famous, rich man who was loved by many and who had a wife and six children, was lonely enough to commit suicide!
There is a bigger force at play here. And we in India, where mental health isn't even addressed need to think about it more. The cure of depression in our culture is get married. And you are not supposed to be depressed post marriage. If you say it aloud to someone, you are looked at with crazy eyes. Why would someone married with kids be depressed?
Chester's suicide is an indicator of how facades are deceptive enough and how somehow the demons of the past keep haunting you. That's what their official statement said. He was a man who found fame and money by singing about his demons and his battles with his inner demons but never really overcame them.
What I want to say here is that, find compassion to people around you, maybe someone really is silently asking for help and maybe you could be the person to save someone's life.
There's this image around Hollywood celebrities of drugs and self destruction. But deep down aren't we all humans requiring care and love in whatever form possible? There's this image around Indians too, we are too full of life to even understand the implications of words like depression, post natal depression, bipolar syndrome etc. In our mind these are all big words coming from west. Nothing could be wrong with the brain. But in reality we all need to start embracing these definitions, if not for diagnosis then for support system.
The last loss of a person that affected me this much was someone closer to me and it's not very much me to be effected by a stranger whose music I loved. But it did. Because now I have the maturity to understand that a suicide cannot be blamed on the person who took that drastic step. The society that pushed that person to take that step is at loss too.
So here goes my tribute to the  person who helped me grow from an idealistic, romantic teenager to a practical woman:
Give me the strength of the rising sun
Give me the truth of words unsung
      So rest your head
      It's time to sleep
     And dream of what's in store
The body bends until it breaks
And sings again no more