I have had many rough phases in my life..I am not gonna say that they saved my life but they did made it a million times better.There ain't no other band in the world to whom i can relate to on such a personal level..I get depressed really easily.Listening to their music just made me feel better so whenever I'd have a really bad day I'd just listen to them and it'd be a lot chiller. Now I'm 17 and things are a lot less crazy (but way more in others) but I still have bad days, and I can still listen to Linkin Park to feel better.
Derek has a good story on this, but that's his story to tell. Here is one from me though taken from the thread 5 Albums That Changed Your Life: In high school, for me, the best way to avoid confrontation was to ignore everybody and everything else. I became very self centered and put up walls to block everybody out. I did this to avoid being bullied, as I was my whole life in school. I shut up, kept my head down and thought about how I wanted to get back at people. I was the kid who sat alone at the lunch table. At the time, I wasn't fine with that. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be one of the people at the "popular table." I wanted to be one of the kids who stepped all over me. The ones who punched me. The ones who stole my lunch. The ones who sneezed, spit and coughed on me. I wanted to be more, but felt like nothing. I started listening to Korn quite a bit because I felt I could relate a little. Still, I felt empty. I begged and pleaded for them to stop as I took my high school classmates' abuse for a year. Tired of it all, without an end in sight, I wanted out of my life. I felt that things would be better off without me. One day when I got home from school, I turned on the radio to do my homework and I heard a song on the radio that would change my life. I never heard a song that I could relate to so much before. It was almost as if the writer of the song had me in mind when they wrote it. Every lyric in the song made me feel more alive than I ever had before. It finally felt like somebody understood me. I used this song as my motivation. The day the album came out, I skipped class and bought it with my lunch money. I listened to the album from front to back thinking about how I wasn't sure about the rapping. Unsure, I listened again and actually read the words to the song. I was elated to find that some how I could relate to just about every word in the entire album. To say I had a new favorite band here was an understatement. I was enamored with not only their music, but with their artistic style as well. I bugged the hell out of the guy at the record shop to order in Linkin Park shirts. I told everybody I could at school about the band (even though "Crawling" and "In The End" helped with that). I wrote "Linkin Park" on my black backpack with white out. In my study hall I wrote out the lyrics to the songs of Hybrid Theory as I sang them in my head. This album made me feel like someone else cares because they went through what I was going through. They survived. I was going to as well. Hybrid Theory Saved my life.
Having to deal with the death of my mother. They were a big help for me. I also learned that I had something that helped me go thru it. Plus if it wasn't for LPU I would have never meet with my BFF. And we both had these guys to help us with our problems. Me with my mother's death and her with her bitter divorce.
A Thousand Suns came out my freshman year of college, which was a really rough year for me for a couple reasons. It was nice to have something to really enjoy during that time.
Some pretty dark shit lol http://www.lpassociation.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34967 Story is in here if you wanna read it.
It was a pleasure reading your stories Guys.To be frank,I had no idea that LP can have such a deep impact on someone's life.Stories of Hybrid,Derek and Pidgeon really touched my heart..You guys are really inspiring to any person who is going through some rough shit to never give up.I didn't knew that a thread already exists for this. Never mind ,new people can share in there stories here.. It's really amazing how the depressing songs of LP serve as a medicine for the already depressed people.
Everything, honestly. As cheesy and corny as it sounds, I've always had this band to fall back on. I'm not saying they saved my life or anything like that, but they've always just been there. I always knew (and know, I guess) that no matter what happened, I could still go listen to my favorite band and watch videos and talk about them on fansites like this and smile about it all. Being obsessed with this band just makes me happy, plain and simple.
tl;dr My childhood sucked ass. Nobody cares. Don't even have to care enough to read post. My mom was borderline and had regular panic attacks where she envisioned the ceiling crashing down on her and killing her. Every emotion she had was magnified ten fold and they overruled any rationality she could have had. Every small annoyance became blood boiling rage. Every sad pang became depression. She was obsessed with cleanliness to the point where she spent all of her free time doing house chores, and pushed my sister and I into doing so too. To waitresses and customer service reps, she was that person. She has gotten into screaming matches with every single person she knew. I don't remember the times she hurt me the most when I was small; I only remember the nightmares that followed and the obsessive degree of fear I kept to not annoy her. I learned to never ask questions, or express an opinion, or ask for help. By age five I developed dermatillomania and a couple years later I became a compulsive daydreamer. In general I grew up so weird I was destined to be a loner. My parents divorced when I was 8 and my mom won custody of us whenever we weren't in school. She moved 50 miles away and then manipulated me into feeling guilty whenever I wanted to be anywhere else during time when she had custody. That would mean I didn't love her. There were no other kids on the block my age. While other kids were visiting friends, having extracurricular activities, going out, going to the prom or sporting events, I was stuck at her home listening to music in some sort of psychic trance or playing video games alone. That's where LP came in. Particularly HT and Meteora. Besides catching my attention with their dynamic, emotional musical style (Power chords are underrated), they made me feel like I wasn't totally alone. Even if no other person gives a single shit about anybody else's problems, I felt nice that I could cheat with LP's illusion of sharing. I could listen to the stories the band had and places they visited, and in a way I was escaping into their much more interesting world. 14 year old me thought Pankake Festival was the shit. If I had access to my father's internet I could visit the LPU where there was a few other people sharing their stories and stuff and it was all therapeutic.
I had a simple happy childhood. I liked HT because I thought it sounded cool. I'm not going to talk about my hard times but I just want to say that ''The Messenger'' is the song that got me through some of the worst times of my life. It had a huge impact on me
This. I guess the only thing LP did (and still does) is when somebody pisses me off, Chester screams ''Shut up!'', ''I wanna see you choke on your lies/Swallow up your greed/Suffer all alone in your misery'' or ''You try to take the best of me, go away!'' instead of me, and when I'm happy, they make me feel even better. But, hell, reading some stuff in the thread that Pidgey posted, I feel really bad about what some of you guys went through, especially Derek's main post. And to think LP kind of helped you get out of it, they're a really special band.
I'll just be 100% honest here: -Suicide attempt (almost successful, was in the ICU for days) -divorce (cheated on) -abuse (as a child) -having no father -Severe drug addiction (The hardest thing to overcome in my life) I could sit here and list things all day that LP music has helped me through but I think you get the point and theres no sense on focusing on the negative side of life.
It's difficult to put in words exactly how Linkin Park got me through some tough times I've had. Without going into too much detail about my personal life, LP provided me with a way to escape and meditate. Before I would go to bed in high school, I would play their songs in order to unwind and de-stress. It may not be as often today, but LP has always been therapeutic for me.
No doubt you had it rough as well. Glad to see you are much better. I feel the same way; so far away. And thanks Flip
I was severely bored whenever I sat at the toilet to take a dump before, since I take forever in the toilet. When I put LP music on my phone, I can freely listen to it while the waves of nature flow from me. Now, I don't have to focus on the odor anymore.
They got me through everything and still do, although my life is less crazy. They got me through abuse, trauma, self harm, bless them. Bless all music that heals.