Bo Burnham's Make Happy - Part Three

Age: 29 years, 8 months, 24 days   In the middle of the “Kanye rant”, Bo randomly tosses in the lines: “I don’t go to the gym ‘cause I’m self-conscious about my body. But I’m self-conscious about my body ‘cause I don’t go to the gym. Irony can be so painful.”
  When he says this, I hear someone acknowledging they need to be honest with people in order for things to be better, but trying to be honest with people makes things worse.
∞   I don’t believe the pain I experienced while talking about my problems was caused by either me or the person I was talking to. I believe I felt bad because I held myself responsible for their reaction.
∞   I’ve said in the first two parts of this series I believe Bo was being literal and honest to the moment he’s in during the end of the “Kanye rant”. He opens the rant by saying, “So as we get to the end of a night of theater, comedy, and sweaters coming on and off…”.
  There’s no way for me to be certain, but I believe the mention of sweaters coming on and off refers to him frequently switching between sincerity and irony. The “Kanye rant” itself seems to be split between literal truth and overt performance.
  When he mentions theater, I believe he’s referring to a performance where it’s impossible to tell if he’s speaking with denotation or connotation.
∞   In the first part of this essay series, I raised a hypothetical behind the special. Here’s another hypothetical:

There’s a twenty-four year old who begins to experience chronic suicidality. He talks to friends, family, and a therapist. Things get worse and he ends up in an acute psychiatric hospital. The psychiatrist’s suggestion is more therapy, which begins a trend of talking to more people.

He continues talking to therapists, friends, and family, and things get worse. Over a three year period he attempts suicide, develops alcohol abuse issues, begins to starve himself, and ends up in a psychiatric hospital five more times.

After the sixth hospitalization, he decides something has to change, so he stops talking to everyone. Nothing changes immediately, but his situation consistently gets better.

A turning point was when he discovered writing as a way to understand himself. He found that when he wrote about the past, people’s responses were different. He believed since he wasn’t talking about an immediate problem, people didn’t feel a need to fix it, and he didn’t feel like he was disappointing them when the problem wasn’t fixed.

  Here’s a hypothetical question: if someone who only writes about the past wants to talk about a problem he’s currently going through, how does he do it?
∞   Maybe the only way Bo could be honest for the last two minutes of the “Kanye rant” was to hide it behind an hour of theater.