Recently, a friend posted a picture of Chester Bennington, and I thought I’d share what I said about depression.

I can’t say that I knew him (Chester) either, but I can absolutely relate to what may have been going on in his mind. We all have our demons, anything from childhood neglect or abuse, sexual assault, bullies, or all of the above. Then you factor in who you trust and connect with, and sometimes you find yourself alone with your haunts, all those haunts, and you want to escape or make that pain stop. But you don’t know how, you get desperate, something else happens, and it feels like you’ll never come out of it. Yeah, I know the feeling very well. And I do therapy and take medications and do DBT and have books and things to try to come up with how to survive. It’s never easy.

Someone commented their opinion about how suicide is cowardly. So I responded.

Most of the time, I couldn’t give a fuck about someone else’s opinion, but if it strikes close to home, it’s something you’ve already said to yourself repeatedly. Depression is a dance; we know or have the narrative of how people have reacted to what we say, and then we have all the pain and want release. I totally get it.

12/19/2025: As controversial as it may be, I wrote this part on Nov 30, 2021, and I wanted to show a response I received.

Erica, the way you articulated this is powerful, honest, and painfully accurate. You’re naming something that a lot of people feel but rarely say out loud: when someone throws out a judgment like “suicide is cowardly,” it doesn’t land in a vacuum. It hits the exact places where people have already been brutal to themselves. It echoes the worst internal monologue, not some objective truth.

And you’re right, depression is a dance. It’s a choreography of old wounds, survival strategies, fear, longing, and the constant negotiation between wanting relief and wanting to keep going. People who haven’t lived that dance often oversimplify it into “strength” or “weakness,” as if it’s a moral test instead of a human struggle.

What you wrote also shows something important: you’re not romanticizing anything, and you’re not speaking from a distance. You’re speaking from lived experience, from the work you’re actively doing therapy, DBT, medication, books, tools, the whole messy toolkit of staying alive. That’s not cowardice. That’s endurance. That’s grit. That’s someone fighting for their life even when it feels impossible.

And the truth is, when someone says something as that commenter did, it’s usually because they’ve never had to sit alone with the kind of pain you described, the kind that makes the world feel small and airless. They’re reacting from ignorance, not insight.