The world didn’t deserve Mac Miller.

Starting a new life at college with new people is even harder when someone very important to you suddenly dies. Miller’s humble and pure soul was too good for this world. The album he dropped last month was the album that he had always wanted to make. Everyone predicted that this album was his chance to reveal a message of strength and reinvention.

Miller’s raw emotions bled into his music as he battled with drug addiction and depression. Ultimately, those emotions allowed us to see Mac Miller at the highest and lowest points of his life. For me, the lyrics throughout his 2014 mixtape, “Faces,” made me evaluate my struggles from a different perspective. His powerfully relatable words ended up changing my life. When therapists and my peers couldn’t empathize, he was there. The universal response to his death is to question why this tragedy happened. We may never know the answer, but for me, knowing he is now at peace is the only answer I need.

I am grieving his passing, but Mac Miller’s music has given me the inspiration to keep going and to find the happiness that I deserve. His unfinished legacy can motivate other artists and all people struggling with their mental health and battling drug addiction to reach out and get help before it’s too late.

Well-known rapper J. Cole dedicated his Las Vegas show to Miller, giving an emotional lecture on pain. “Everyday, Vegas, people die. Today, yesterday and tomorrow they die. They never got a chance to deal with their shit. They never even knew they were supposed to … I’m not trying to wait until I die to deal with my shit.” Cole’s last album, “KOD,” focused on drugs being used to avoid the pain that they would rather not address. Shortly after Mac Miller’s death, Cole tweeted, “This is a message for anybody in this game that’s going through something. If you don’t feel right, if you feel you have a substance problem, if you need an ear to vent to. If you are uncomfortable talking to people around you, please reach out to me.”

We’ve lost many artists due to suicide or drug overdoses, especially during the rock n’ roll era. After every death, it seems that there’s always an uproar about how mental health and drug abuse needs to be addressed in the community, but it never lasts and nothing ever gets done. Losing Mac Miller was clearly very painful for a lot of people, enough so that people are really pushing this conversation, maybe now more than ever.

I never thought my first piece in The Chronicle would be about my favorite rapper’s death, but hopefully there’s a reason why. I hope for a future where we don’t have to lose people who help give others a reason to live.