You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh, on most levels. OK, fair enough, Harry has suffered in ways that no amount of money could really fix: his mum was killed in a car crash when he was only 12, he has engaged in military action (which messes up pretty much everyone who sees active combat), his family have made it clear that they don’t like or approve of his wife, and he has been publicly, officially and continually labelled and treated as his older brother’s inferior, all his life. For the larger part of his life, he has not had the option (open to most high-profile people who whine incessantly and tiresomely about the horrors of fame) of saying: fuck this, I’m off. Kids don’t get much say in their lives if they are born into famous families.
When he did get the option of fucking off out of it, though, (with a big bag of money and enough connections to continue making money) he seems to have decided to become a professional over-sharer. In other words, a full-tilt ridiculous whinyarse. That’s the thing with the type of mental health therapy that emphasises ‘telling your truth’ – you don’t have to tell everyone, because most people don’t need to know and don’t care. They’ve got their own stuff to worry about. If every conversation you engage in ends up featuring a big monologue about how your parents didn’t love you, you were bullied all through school, you got dumped once a week and all the rest of it, some people are going to start wondering how much of it was a you problem in the first place. Or they’ll laugh the minute you’re out of earshot. The utter self-obsession becomes grating, especially to those who barely know you and especially if they are suffering from stress, poor health or acute grief themselves.
Writing (and music, and art of any kind, really) is often recommended as a way of dealing with profound distress. It can be cathartic, it can be helpful. However, those benefits are
for the person producing it rather than those expected to read, watch or listen to the results. Suffering can lead to Great Art, but it’s not guaranteed if you had little or no aptitude for the type of art you put your pain into before the Terrible Thing. Shitty art, however sincere, is more likely to be unintentionally hilarious than anything else.
Apparently Harry’s favourite symbol/metaphor/thingy is a hummingbird. Perhaps he can fly away into the American sunset and become comfy in his own skin, while the rest of us can stop bothering about him.