I write about what I know: teenage dating, overly charged

In the halls where apprentices once learned by candle and bruised knuckle, a simple oath governed all honest craft: “I write about what I know.” So speaks Bo Burnham, naming the granary from which his art draws bread. He does not promise comfort. He names the tangled hedgerow of youth—teenage dating, overly charged sexuality, and all the things that make you uncomfortable—and he turns toward it rather than away. The saying is both permission and provocation: the truest voice is won not by fleeing the awkward, but by kneeling beside it and listening until it speaks its full name.

To write about what I know is not mere autobiography; it is fidelity to lived weather—the humid air of locker-lined corridors, the clatter of phones that never sleep, the ache of wanting to be seen and the fear of being seen too much. Teenage dating is not only courtship; it is apprenticeship in risk and rejection, a theater where identities try on masks that sometimes stick. When an artist brings this stage to the page, he carries the salt of real tears; the work stings, cleans, and keeps the wound from rotting beneath silence.

Then comes overly charged sexuality, the live wire strung through the young body and the culture that markets it. The ancients would call for temperance; the modern marketplace calls for clicks. Between those calls stands the artist, measuring voltage. To name the current frankly—without leering, without lying—is a moral act. It refuses both prudery that shames and pornography that consumes. It says: here is desire, magnificent and combustible; handle it with reverence, lest you burn the house meant to shelter you.

We are told that art should soothe. Yet some songs worth keeping begin with a wince—all the things that make you uncomfortable. Consider the painter Goya, who set before Spain not only courtly sweetness but also the nightmares that history had birthed. Or recall Socrates, whose questions rasped like a whetstone against the city’s pride; Athenians called the sting a nuisance, yet that sting kept the blade honest. In each case, discomfort was not cruelty; it was surgery. The cut hurt because rot had spread.

Take a nearer story. A high-school teacher—call her Mara—assigned essays on the hallway mythologies no adult names: rating lists, party rumors, the pressure to be “experienced” by a deadline no one sets aloud. Students wrote first with sarcasm, then with heat, then with relief. One quiet kid described saying “no” and losing friends; another confessed saying “yes” and losing herself. When they read each other’s words, the room changed shape. Shame leaked out through the seams, and in its place came recognition. The writing did not fix their lives in an afternoon; it gave them a language to ask for better days.

From this, a lesson fit for carving on a lintel: honesty is a lantern, not a weapon. When an artist says, “I write about what I know,” he vows to fetch light from the basement, not to swing it in triumph. He accepts that the reader’s first response may be a flinch—and trusts that the second may be understanding. The measure of success is not applause alone, but the sound of a door unlocking in someone else’s chest.

Let the counsel be plain. If you make art, walk toward the cringe and name it carefully. Keep your gaze clean: neither coy nor salacious. Pair exposure with context—show not just the heat of the moment, but its weather system: family, faith, fear, the algorithms that bait the hook. If you are a parent, mentor, or friend, read such work with courage; ask real questions; trade lectures for conversations. And for all who listen: when a piece touches teenage dating, overly charged sexuality, or other matters that make you uncomfortable, pause before you recoil. Ask what truth is being handled, and whether your discomfort is the price of becoming a larger soul. In this way the awkward becomes altar, the admitted flaw becomes medicine, and the work of one honest voice teaches a whole village to breathe.