Kanye West opens up about his 2016 nervous breakdown in new interview

After suffering a nervous breakdown in 2016 and having been mostly incommunicado for over a year, rapper Kanye West expounded on his return to Twitter, on being hurt that his friend and colleague Jay-Z and wife Beyoncé missed West's wedding to Kim Kardashian, and on feeling helpless when Kardashian was robbed in Paris.

"I think I'm in a stronger place than I ever was, after the breakdown — or I like to say the breakthrough," West, 40, said on radio personality Charlamagne Tha God's podcast, "We Got Love." His breakdown, which began during a Sacramento concert in November 2016 and continued two days later when he was  involuntarily hospitalized in Los Angeles, came, he said, from  "fear, stress, control, being controlled, manipulation . . . stressing things that create, like, validation that I didn't need to worry about as much. And y'know, just the concept of competition . . . [Rapper] Kali got this song, Drake got this song on the radio and 'Saint Pablo' ain't playing."

He closed his recently reopened Twitter account nearly a year ago, he said, because, "I didn't have a lot to say. I had a lot to learn." He restored his Instagram account in February after nine months away, and his Twitter account on April 13. "I felt the need to speak at this point," he said. "When you look up five years from now or 10 years from now, there'll be, I'll be even more, I'll have more experience, I'll be in a better place than I was today. . . . Y'know, there'll be mistakes, there'll be flaws the way I communicate today, because we're human beings, we're flawed. . . . I'm not trying to say the right thing. I'm just saying exactly what I feel out of love."

He added of his return to social media, "I think everything is therapeutic, but I'm not doing it as a form of personal therapy. It's just an innate feeling I want to express."

The rift that occurred following a $20 million deal between rapper and music mogul Jay-Z and West last year came about, he said, from "the fact that he was worried that it came from him. . . . That made me feel like I owed more than just the money itself, the fact that it came from him. . . . I don't need to be controlled, I just need to be inspired and informed." Nonetheless, the two now are "good. We texting each other. It's positive energy. . . . I haven't seen him but I can feel him."

Three years before the rift, however, "I was hurt about [Jay-Z and Beyoncé] not coming to the wedding" in Florence, Italy, in May 2014. " I understand they was going through some things, but if it's family," as the two have figuratively professed to be, "you're not going to miss a wedding. And I'm not using this interview to put any negative things, but I gotta state my truth."

West also touched on, among other topics, Kardashian's robbery at gunpoint in her hotel room in Paris in October 2016. "The situation with my wife in Paris . . . you're feeling, like, helpless, you're feeling, like, what can you do?" He added that Kardashian apparently had advance word she might be robbed. "One of the things that she said that she heard is that they were coming to rob her and they had to wait till I had left. And that the people had been strategizing and scheming on that for a long time. So when she finally got to Paris by herself, they were like, 'OK, this is our chance.' Next thing you know I get off on a flight the next day, and they were like, 'Oh, OK, we gotta, like, fall back.' "

He then left Paris to perform a concert in Queens, and said he was terrified for Kardashian when he got word of the robbery. "If she wasn't here," he told Charlamagne Tha God, " I would never forgive myself."