My dear beloved customers,
I wasn’t planning on writing a post about Café 42’s playlist this week and yet, life, the Universe and everything shook me up a few days ago with Linkin Park’s new livestream. I was so moved by the resilience and the creativity it took to Mike Shinoda to start over again, reinvent the band after their mythical singer, Chester Bennington, past away in 2017.
Back to 2007, the year I went to see them in concert in Paris. I must say I was fascinated by Chester’s incredible vocal performance and the way his emotions transpired so strongly. When you listen to the songs he wrote with Mike Shinoda, it’s like a journal of his suffering, his inner pain, a map to his grief and sorrow. “Numb”, the song I chose for this playlist today, was the song with which I discovered Linkin Park and I so vividly remember that I could feel the pain in Chester’s voice, it so strongly resonnated with mine that I thought we were sharing the same shoes.
Indeed, the lyrics of the song were in details how I felt during my first breakdown, when I was sitting on my bed, choosing whether to live or to commit suicide the next day by throwing myself under the commuter train. I’ve heard Lee Harris in one of his latest video say that we have several exit points during our life offered to us if we want to get out of it. If it is true, then this one was the more obvious to me.
In the lyrics, Chester talks about someone preventing him to be himself, smothering him. That person was my mother to me.
I'm tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface
I don't know what you're expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
It was exactly how I felt. My father had been out of the picture from my 6th birthday until my mid-teenage years, coming in and out ever since, so I lived alone with my very unbalanced mother in a symbiotic relationship in which my mother thought I was some sort of extension of herself, with no will or boundaries of my own.
My half brother was born when I was eleven, the moment I entered teenagehood and junior high school. My mother severed the symbiotic link and merged with my brother instantly - she had regularly told me that she had wanted a boy when she was pregnant with me. But not only did I cease to exist in my mother’s eyes, she also began to explain to me, day after day, how mistaken I was in every single step I took towards myself that didn’t resemble her. And as she suffered from heavy depression, her only aspirations in life were flesh pleasures to numb her own sufferings and grief, such as money and sex, a very deviant model for a teenager to identify with.
I was, and still am by the way, what we call now a sensitive person and a free spirit. I think I mentionned it in another post but I vividly remember my mother going to a meeting with my French teacher when I was in high school because I hadn’t attended class regularly during the year, - I thought that what they were teaching me was a waste of my time, useless for my future life which happened to be kind of true actually. My teacher explained to my mother I was a bohemian, meaning a free spirit, and that I wouldn’t adapt easily in a conventional box.
Indeed, I didn’t understand, still don’t, the codes of our material society and the “only” path offered to us, some sort of slavery with bits of happiness: find a job to earn money, buy stuff, find love, make babies, retire and die. What kind of expectations for life was that? Well, it was those I was offered by my mom in a very constrictive way. Every step outside of the box implied spiteful gazes and remarks from her part, telling me I was going to fail miserably if I took a different path from hers. She thought the best thing that could happen to me was to become a certified accountant or a public servant like her when I was dreaming of writing, singing and acting.
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
But what could I do? She was my mother, the refering adult, she was the one supposed to know that stuff and my stepfather, who was just like a father to me, taking care of me, pushed me in the same direction for their minds were alike in that matter. So I did what I was told, going to college to learn English and American litterature and civilization, not knowing what I would do afterwards, trying to figure out what I would become. I lied a lot to my mother at that time, worked in a music studio for a while rather than go to classes, but mostly staying put, chainsmoking in my student room, reading and watching TV, waiting for someone, anyone really, to come and rescue me. I spent two years afterward, back at my parents’, trying and failing to pass the exams to become an English teacher which, of course, I didn’t really want to become, but what else could I do with an English degree? When I was supposed to go to class, I went to the theater instead, almost everyday, watched a movie, then staying at the bar inside the theater smoking, reading and doing crossword puzzles to pass the time. So I lied to everyone for long long years. I sometimes still have bad dreams about this period in which I tell my mom I’m going to school and arrive to pass my exams though I haven’t been to class all year. Very uncomfortable dreams.
I've become so numb, I can't feel you there
Become so tired, so much more aware
I'm becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you
So when, at 28 years old, I began my first therapy, I was at that point in which I couldn’t distinguish my mother’s voice in my head from mine, hers was a loud scolding voice and mine was just a faint whisper that, for the first time, I began to hear. It was such a beautiful moment to be reunited with myself even for frail instants in the first years.
Can't you see that you're smothering me?
Holding too tightly, afraid to lose control
'Cause everything that you thought I would be
Has fallen apart right in front of you
At that period, I had become an executive secretary, living in an appartement that was owned by my mother so she could drop out on me anytime she wanted, at least several times a week. She would call me several times a day, telling me she wanted to make sure I was okay though she never actually asked me once in her life how I felt. She never really cared. She just wanted to control what I was doing and who I was seeing. She was insanely nosy. One night, it was a few months before I left to live with my husband 800 km (500 miles) from her, I had turned off my phone to spend a peaceful evening with friends and when I got home and turned it back on, she had saturated my voicemail with more than sixty messages.
And I know
I may end up failing too
But I know
You were just like me, with someone disappointed in you
My mom is not a monster, though. She is just the result of an abusive childhood. She was what we used to call a substitute child. Her baby sister died at 18 months old and when my mother was born, my grand-parents named her after her sister so she wore the same first name and she had to kiss her dead sister’s photo goodnight every evening when she was a child. There was no way my mother could have grown as a healthy balanced person. I don’t think she had resilience inside her either, there’s a history of mental illnesses in the women lineage of my grandmother’s family, depression and early dementia mostly, and it made it quite impossible for my mother to recover from what we call now PTSD which was what her childhood caused.
Sometimes, I think I was born in that family to break the circle of depression that has been going on for centuries, especially because it only touched women. I think I inherited my resilient abilities from my father’s genes and that is part of what saved me, what enabled me to grow out of it and become myself at last.
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
And every second I waste is more than I can take
Back to the exit point, there is one moment in your life, the breaking point, when the suffering is so intense, when you fell so inadequate, that you can’t take it anymore, just seeing yourself as a huge embarrassing failure everytime you try to express yourself. Sitting on my bed, there was two doors in front of my eyes: one with an emergency exit green light symbol above it and one tinily ajar with a small faint ray of light coming through. I chose to go for the light because I could feel the love coming out of it and I went to therapy within a week after that night.
Back to Linkin Park, I think what the lyrics of Chester’s songs show album after album is that he went looking for the ajar door for a long time but never found it and finally decided to take the next exit point in 2017, hanging himself in his home after one of his best friends, Chris Cornell, Soundgarden’s singer, had done the same thing two months before. Chester killed himself on Chris Cornell’s birthday.
The rest of the band, and the fans of course, were devastated. It seemed such a waste of so creative - yet so painful -a life, though most of the band’s musical creations came from one of Linkin Park’s founding members, Mike Shinoda. It was obvious at that time that the band had died with its irreplaceable frontman.
This morning, after several weeks of mysterious announcements, Linkin Park released a livestream video show with a new singer, an incredible female one which would prevent any comparison with Chester whatsoever.
Life and creation have reclaimed their rights over death and grief and the band’s members were able to reinvent themselves without betraying their deceased friend but honoring him in the process. The band’s new songs surely won’t reflect the same melancoly and suffering as Chester’s ones but they will still be reflecting who the other members’ are including the new singer. It’s a new Linkin Park era.
They all look so joyful to play live again together and sharing their music with the audience, it is such a real resilience, love and hope lesson. Though Chester chose the exit door, they all chose the light, celebrating their friend’s life, creations, rather than his death. And I am so thankful to have been able to witness that creative rebirth. Life is amazing, the Universe is amazing, Everything that includes love and joy is amazing. Music and creativity are life changers, human beings are creators, that is our main purpose, and love and joy are our main tools. If we remember that, then we know what life is really about and that’s the reality of a world I fit perfectly in.
Lots of love,
Geay