However, Harry continued to battle with his anxiety in silence. “Everywhere I go, every single time I meet someone, it’s almost like I’m being drained of this energy. Picking up on other people’s emotion,” he remembered. “Finally, I’d bump into someone who was sweating more than me, and I would stop, be able to speak to them and then everything would calm down and then I could move on again.”
After a while, Harry tried to numb these feelings. “I was willing to drink. I was willing to take drugs. I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling,” he said. “But I slowly became aware that, OK, I wasn’t drinking Monday to Friday, but I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night. And I would find myself drinking not because I was enjoying it, but because I was trying to mask something.”
Although, Harry said he wasn’t aware he was trying to shield his inner turmoil at the time. It “was my brain telling me that I’m in a fight,” he said. “I never knew that. Why would I know that?”