“Hey, I don’t want to be dramatic, but I’m pretty sure I’m having a heart attack,” Joshua Bassett said as he turned to the medic on the set.
Bassett had been getting sicker all week. Filming of the second season of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a recent hit on Disney+, was just beginning. Bassett plays the lead role of Ricky Bowen, a guitarist and skateboarder who fulfills the role of Troy Bolton in his school’s production of High School Musical. But with each day of filming that passed, Bassett was feeling worse and worse.
“Take a nap,” his producers told him. “You have a history of anxieties.”
Five minutes later, Bassett sat up.
“No. I’m not okay.”
In the car on the way to the hospital, everything suddenly became real. It was two days after Bassett’s ex-girlfriend and co-star, Olivia Rodrigo, had released her debut single, “Drivers License.” “Drivers License” was a heartbroken ballad allegedly about Rodrigo watching Bassett move on with someone else. Within days, Rodrigo shot from the narrow audience of Disney+ into becoming a household name. Saturday Night Live featured the song in a viral skit about Bassett’s and Rodrigo’s breakup. Soon, Joe Biden even invited Rodrigo to the White House to promote vaccinations for COVID-19. “Drivers License” would go on to be streamed over a billion times during the following six months.
On the way to the hospital, Bassett broke down into tears. The fallout from “Drivers License” was sending him into a tailspin. As Rodrigo’s song shot to the top of charts, online hate for Joshua Bassett went viral.
“Just finished listening to drivers license this is now a joshua bassett hate club,” one Twitter user wrote after the release.
“Joshua Bassett really went from everyones fav white boy list to kill list within the span of four days,” another explained.
But the stress wasn’t just from the Internet. Paparazzi were following his every move. Coffee shops would play Rodrigo’s music every time he walked through the door. Death threats were piling up in his inbox.
Joshua Bassett had been feeling sicker and sicker all week because the anxieties of the spotlight were sending him to such profound stress that he was going into septic shock.
Bassett was realizing how seriously sick he was. It was January 2021. Hospitals were refilling with a winter wave of COVID-19. And yet, after hours of screenings and multiple tests, the doctors turned to Bassett and said, “We don’t want to alarm you, but we have to let you know that you are the sickest person in the hospital.”
If he hadn’t arrived at the hospital when he had, the doctors told him that he wouldn’t have lasted 12 hours.
~~~~~
I: Crisis
With the exception of the odd interview here or there, Bassett remained generally silent about what happened to him over the course of 2021. It wasn’t until he released an EP of three songs, “Crisis,” “Secret,” and “Set Me Free” in December, that he began to publicly address his mental health journey of anxiety, anger, and acceptance.
He begins his story with “Crisis.”
The music video begins with Bassett in a pink suit, a white shirt and an acoustic guitar in his hands. “I: Crisis” flashes across the screen before the camera pans to Bassett’s forlorn face. He looks directly at the camera while singing “My label said to never waste a crisis”.
He sits on a hill in the dwindling minutes before sunset, holding down a white sheet background with his chair and a few weights.
“Honestly, I didn’t want to write this,” he admits. The camera pans out to show a camera filming him. The boom mic hovers over him until the director says “Cut!” and the equipment fades away.
“Don’t know if I can, still holdin’ back, still wanna run,” he reveals.
The first part of “Crisis” is blunt and honest, exposing Bassett’s instinct to run away from his feelings. Everything in him is hoping that he can ignore his problems until they go away. The idea of facing his pain and experiencing an agony that would evoke tears is sickening to him. It’s a sentiment that’s been beaten into him for years.
“I was a very emotional kid,” he told GQ in June. “I was constantly yelled at for crying. I would spend every night being like, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.’ I remember beating myself up every night.”
Like many men, he was taught that it wasn’t okay to feel vulnerable. Real men, he was told, move on.
But as time passed and Rodrigo continued to release music about him, this instinct became unsustainable. Whether Bassett was ready or not, there was money in reacting to a crisis. Bassett’s label pushed him to face his feelings and write, even if the songs were just meant to attract headlines.
The music video continues with Bassett putting his guitar down, walking away and singing directly to the camera, “If you get to tell your truth, then so do I.”
Many of Bassett’s lyrics seem addressed to Rodrigo. He sings that he loved her, that half of the things she’s saying are only half true, and that he too was hurt by their breakup. But while he laments their relationship, the true cries of the song lie outside of their high school drama.
“Don’t you ever wonder if I’m okay?” is Bassett’s cry of abandonment. As this crisis envelops his whole world, like a planet falling into a black hole, no one, not even someone who claims to have loved him, makes him feel seen. As Bassett walks below the azure sky lit by the waning rays of the sun, he walks alone. Despite the attention of the cameras and the headlines, he feels isolated.
To Bassett, Rodrigo’s true betrayal was leaving him in his worst times of crisis. According to his interviews, she never reached out to him as the harassment got out of control. She never called him, like his mother did, panicked about the death threats or even when he was in the hospital. In fact, they hadn’t spoken since “Drivers License” was released, even though Bassett reached out. She never even seemed to address the harassment her fans sent him.
“I feel like a lot of this year people haven’t seen me as a human being,” Bassett told radio host Zach Sang in a December 22nd interview.
“I would see TikToks with like 50 million views and 10 million likes saying, ‘If I ever see that kid on the street, I’m going to f*cking kill him,’” he told GQ. “It’s hard to see that and then be living in New York and walking down the street.”
In his interview with Sang, Bassett defined love through the lens of presence.
“True love, not romantic love, true love, says I care for you as a human being and I care in your best interest,” he says. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Crisis” is Bassett’s first step in accepting that the support he desires from someone else may never come. In the video, as Bassett looks downward towards the bottom of the steep hill that falls out of sight, he concludes the song with “You would never dare, you would never dare to waste a crisis.” With that, he begins to walk down the hill himself, realizing that this journey back to stability is one that only he can take.
~~~~~
II: Secret
“When I was in the hospital, there was a moment after about three days when they came in and they were like, ‘Your vitals aren’t getting any better. You’re not improving. We’re very worried.”
Bassett had a 30% chance of surviving. As Bassett lay in his hospital bed, the stresses of his life swelled beneath the surface.
The second phase of Bassett’s journey was coming to terms with his “Secret.”
The video begins with “II. Secret” hovering in the sheer white illumination of a car’s headlights. Bassett is sitting in the driveway with a girl in his passenger seat. As she gets out and runs into the house, he sings about her alleged infidelity and his refusal to believe it.
Although the girl in the video looks vastly different from Rodrigo, various lyrics hint at her and Bassett’s breakup.
“Good for you foolin’ everyone / You had me tricked for sixteen months / Your smoke and mirrors had me hypnotized,” he sings. “Well, I heard the truth last night / Your secret’s safe with me.”
“Good for you” calls back to Olivia Rodrigo’s hit follow-up song to “Drivers License” called “Good 4 U.” Sixteen months is the probable length of their relationship. Smoke and mirrors evokes a darker take on the rose-colored glasses people frequently experience in a relationship. Bassett even sings later that “When your ‘woe is me’ stops working, I bet your songs won’t sound the same,” alluding to a singer-songwriter ex.
Bassett follows the girl into the house. There’s no furniture, only rooms filled with navy blue light or sunset orange shadows. The girl dashes through the background, disappearing with and without another guy.
“Oh, your secret’s safe with me,” Bassett reassures her. He won’t tell anyone his side of the story. He loves her enough to protect her from the pain he experienced even though she wouldn’t do the same.
As Bassett searches for the girl around the house, he asks, “How could you be so cold?” Continuing one of the central themes from “Crisis,” Bassett asks the girl why she abandoned him. He struggles as he realizes that in the way that he defines love, that this girl never loved him.
“I realized in wanting to protect people that I love that the people who haven’t protected me maybe didn’t love me in the way that they think they did,” he told Sang when talking about his songs.
“Secret” is Bassett’s proclamation that he will still protect the people who hurt him. Now that he has come to terms with what they’ve done to him, he’s deciding how he’ll react. He consciously chooses to not be like them, even if he would be justified in revenge.
Although the song and music video are about an ex, scattered lyrics allude to something deeper.
“Good for you for foolin’ everyone.
“You had me tricked for sixteen months.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
These lyrics can also be read through the lens of abuse. Abusers normally hide in plain sight. They’re oftentimes charming. No one, sometimes not even the ones that they’ve abused, really recognizes what hides behind the mask. And Bassett himself had been sexually abused as a child and teenager.
When he was about five years old, a family member took advantage of him. It took Bassett almost ten years to tell anyone. The first person he told was an older friend in his theater group. He became Bassett’s next sexual abuser.
As Bassett struggled to articulate what had happened to him, the older boy’s reaction was stark. “Ew, what the hell? That’s disgusting. Why would you tell me that? That’s so embarrassing,” he recounted to Sang. With that, Bassett fell back into his shell. He had been told again that his pain was something to be ignored and ashamed of.
“It just was like boom. Gone. Forget about it. That is never coming out again. No one will ever know about that. That’s the most disgusting thing in the world. Forget about it,” he continued. “Little did I know of course he was uncomfortable with that because he himself was perpetrating it.”
But Bassett was keeping all of that buried. It was tucked so deep inside of him that he couldn’t even remember all of it. He didn’t want to.
“I didn’t know any male presence outside of my dad. I didn’t really have friends growing up. I didn’t really know what a normal relationship was like,” he said. The older boy who abused him in his teenage years started out small, asking for sexual favors before ramping up his abuse. No one knew that Bassett was being abused. Like “Secret” says, everyone was fooled, including Bassett himself.
“Your secret’s safe with me” reveals Bassett’s mindset in a few ways. First, Bassett refuses to publicly name his abuser. It is his right to decide what he is comfortable with. But given Bassett’s inclination to bury his trauma, perhaps Bassett is simultaneously afraid to face his own secrets.
Although many who are abused feel isolated, they struggle to talk about their abuse because it fills them with shame and guilt, especially for male victims. Male victims are still oftentimes mocked, not believed, or conditioned to believe that any confrontation with their trauma is a sign of demasculinized weakness.
When Bassett himself started publicly talking about his sexual abuse, many online weren’t empathatic.
“You should be more grateful someone wanted to touch ur nasty ***,” wrote one Twitter user.
“Rape is assault + privilege. Men have male privilege therefore they cannot be raped,” added another.
“How is a MAN getting sexually assaulted? This is what happens when you let men be soft. We want our strong & manly men back!” someone else reacted.
These sentiments are why many men struggle to come forward or address their trauma at all.
As Bassett reconciles with the truth of what happened to him, it may take time for him to accept his own secrets. As Bassett sings in front of his band in the video, he appears paranoid, looking back suspiciously at his band as if he’s afraid they know something about him that they shouldn’t. Or, perhaps he’s afraid that they’re judging him. Their backs are turned, so Bassett’s secret should be safe. But once the chorus ends, he leaves, taking away their opportunity to truly see him.
As the bridge ends and the song’s instrumentation fades, Bassett confronts the girl. He walks around her with a calm confidence that’s beyond his years, like a fully grown man confronting a years-long former flame. It showcased a growing maturity beyond that of a 20-year-old Disney actor playing the role of a high school boy.
He keeps eye contact with the girl as he sings that he’ll keep her secrets. As she stands silently, the lights suddenly begin to flicker. He flinches, as if he’s being exposed by the flashing lights. He covers his eyes and looks away. The girl is gone.
Bassett is left with his secrets.
~~~~~
III. Set Me Free
2021 was Joshua Bassett’s mental health journey. And the catalyst of Bassett’s journey was in January of that year, as he laid in his hospital bed with death knocking on his door.
“I just remember sitting there and I was literally like ‘I need help. I need help – that’s all I said. I need help.”
As soon as Bassett accepted his pain, he began to heal.
“Immediately I felt at least 50 times better than I had. The doctors came in about half an hour later. They took my blood. They did a couple more tests and they said, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this but you’ve improved almost miraculously.’”
Stress was a primary cause of his septic shock. A mental block that refused to allow him to address his trauma almost literally killed him.
After a few days, Bassett was released from the hospital. He slowly started to search for healthy ways to cope with the way his life had changed. Dealing with his mental health started with songwriting.
Diego Alderete Sanchez ‘25, a songwriter at Yale, told The Politic how songwriting can be a release.
“It’s sort of like a diary. Writing about what you feel… prevents them from being all bottled up and such,” he explained, drawing from his own experiences. “If you write [your feelings] down, it’s more concrete, and you can actually deal with it more healthily. To be honest, the song part is secondary to the writing-down-feelings part.”
Rachel Pontious, ‘24, enjoys playing piano in her spare time, and she agrees.
“I find that playing [piano] is a good way to process whatever is on my mind,” she says. “It’s so cathartic to me to be able to put emotion into what I’m playing, and it also helps me process and express my own emotions. When I’m having a bad day I’ll often find myself in a practice room.”
Bassett wrote more than 100 songs in 2021, many of which he doesn’t plan to release. They’re for him to help reconcile with his pain.
He also journals. He meditates. He takes long ice-cold showers. Now that he attends therapy twice a week, he cries “almost daily.”
Realizing that he needed help was Bassett’s first step of letting go. Instead of bottling up his pain, Bassett began to release it — even physically.
“There was one night in particular. I finally let go… I scream-cried for three and a half hours,” he told GQ in December.
Bassett vowed to reclaim control over his life and his happiness. His outlook on everything from love to the public to himself changed.
“I realized that when you don’t have love for yourself then when other people hate you, it reconfirms the hate you already have for yourself. So you believe them – or when you have shame – you think you are unworthy of love,” Bassett said.
All the external trauma in Bassett’s life had snowballed, from the sexual abuse to the online harassment, into deep internalized self-hatred. While outside opinions reinforced his biggest insecurities, Bassett’s refusal to deal with his depression — an expression of his anger at himself and the world — manifested into physical pain.
By the end of 2021, Bassett was evolving, letting go of preconceived notions of himself and others. Through that lens, Bassett wrote “Set Me Free.”
His music video opens with Bassett sitting at a grand piano in the middle of a beach. The sky is mostly clear, spreading over dark grains of sand, and only punctuated by a few gray clouds.
The lyrics start with a striking portrait of Bassett’s depression.
“I don’t know what I did to deserve all this,” he begins. It’s as if he’s asking the world what’s wrong with him. He’s asking why he had to endure all of this.
“And nothin’ I say will ease the pain / But why must I hurt for you to feel okay?” He sings lightly, staring at his fingers dancing on the piano keys.
“I’ve been runnin’ away / I’ve been facing my fears / Tell my mom I’m okay while I’m holdin’ back tears,” Bassett sings.
While Bassett acknowledges his propensity to run away, just like in “Crisis”, Bassett’s not running anymore. He’s facing his demons, internal and external. While the journey is difficult, he tells the people who do care about him, like his mother, that he’s okay. Despite the pain, he’s still standing.
Physically and emotionally, Bassett almost didn’t make it. In the song, he reveals that he “wasn’t sure [he’d] survive.” He had “never felt so weak.”
Bassett hesitates before breathing deeply into the chorus, “You don’t get to take all of me / Set me free.”
Bassett’s chorus is a declaration that he’s separating how the world sees him from how he sees himself. He used to let other people’s opinions and actions control him to the point of self-destruction. When he sings the words “Set Me Free,” it’s not a question. It’s a command. He’s demanding them to listen to his voice and not theirs.
However, he acknowledges that his own self-love does not mean he hates the people who hurt him. (“I hope you know that I still care about you dearly”). He’s just telling them that it’s time for him to prioritize himself. He’s got to “lock the door and throw away the key.” The access they had to his heart is gone.
In his interview with Sang, Bassett expands on this sentiment even more.
“A key word for me in this healing process has been ‘and,’” Bassett said. “Because a lot of times what we’ll say is ‘Yes, they hurt me but they’re hurting themselves,’ and what that does is it invalidates your own experience.”
Bassett says that we must give grace to ourselves and the people who hurt us. Remembering everyone’s humanity is a crucial step in healing.
“Saying ‘this person abused me and they’re suffering’ is how you allow space to process and validate your feelings but also then hold space for them as a human being,” Bassett concluded.
In Bassett’s final words of “Set Me Free,” he emerges with a greater strength than he’s ever had. While the message of the song is partially to his abusers, it’s also a promise to himself. He’s going to keep fighting for his mental health.
He looks at the camera and says, “I won’t ever let you hurt me how you hurt me again, ever again.”
~~~~~
Six months after his near death experience, Bassett was better equipped at handling a crisis. In his June interview with GQ, Bassett accidentally revealed that he wasn’t completely straight. Once news broke that Joshua Bassett thought Harry Styles was hot, Bassett immediately began to trend #1 on Twitter.
Bassett saw all of the reactions: love, hate, anger, confusion. His PR team was freaking out: How should they address this? What should they say?
Only Bassett was calm. He was even prepared. Coming out gave him “an opportunity to say something he believed in.”
In less than 30 seconds he wrote a post to formally come out. And he didn’t look back.
While the online harassment of Bassett hasn’t completely stopped, (“And you expect me to care for a gay man? Stream all too well instead,” one Twitter user wrote in response to Bassett’s discussion of his sexuality and sexual abuse), Bassett has changed how he reacts to it.
“What I’ve learned in this last year is that it’s not about what happens. It’s about how you react to it. A lot of times we feel out of control and there’s a lot of things we can’t control. But in reality, you can control how you respond to things. You can control how you maneuver things,” he said in his final moments with Sang.
Dr. Zeleyka Fowler, a clinical psychologist at Yale Health, agrees.
“Establishing and maintaining your own personal boundaries surrounding your exposure and/or participation in social media is one way to engage with your social network while also having a balance that feels good for you,” she advised young people, in an interview with The Politic. “Also don’t forget to prioritize making connections with people in real-life; engage with your community.”
Joshua Bassett is doing just that. In the months following the release of Joshua Bassett’s songs “Crisis”, “Secret” and “Set Me Free,” Bassett is opening his mental health journey to others. He’s not doing it for money — all of the proceeds from those three songs will go to mental health organizations.
Later this year, he plans to launch his own podcast called “Taboo Talks” where he hopes that sharing his own struggles will help others finally cope with theirs. In his interview with GQ, he says that he wants the podcast to be what “he wishes he had when he was a kid.”
Joshua Bassett rose from 2021 like a phoenix from the ashes. A year after being at death’s door, he’s still growing, healing, and releasing new music. He’s taking it one day at a time. And he hopes everyone else does too.