He told Dax Shepard, host of the podcast Armchair Expert, that as a royal he was expected to “grin and bear it” and “get on with it”. “It’s the job, right?” Harry said during the interview. But he went on to add, “I was in my early twenties and I was thinking, I don’t want this job, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this.” “Look what it did to my mum. How am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and family, when I know it’s going to happen again?” His motherPrincess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 following a high-speed pursuit by paparazzi. He said that it was therapy that helped him to break free of the constraints, both mental and literal, of royal life. “It was like the bubble burst,” he said. “I plucked my head out of the sand and gave it a good shake off and I was like, You’re in this position of privilege, stop complaining and stop thinking you want something different—make this different—because you can’t get out.” The Duke of Sussex said he asked himself, “How are you going to do these things differently, how are you going to make your mum proud and use this platform to really affect change?” In the end, he did get out, stepping down as a senior royal and relocating to Montecito, California, with his wife Meghan Markleand his son Archie. Harry spoke about the time he’s spent reflecting on his experience of leaving the royal family and how to “break the cycle” of “pain and suffering” so that his children don’t go through the same thing. (Harry and Meghan are currently expecting a daughter.) He said, “I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically. “It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway so we as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say, You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.” Understanding his father Prince Charles’ upbringing has helped Harry to see that he himself was treated the same way that Charles was treated while growing up. Which leaves him with the question: “How can I change that for my own kids?” The duke said that living in California has brought small freedoms that would have been unthinkable back in Britain, such as cycling with Archie on the back of his bike. He also shared a cute anecdote about the early days of his and Meghan Markle’s relationship, when she first came to London to visit him. “We met up in a supermarket in London, pretending we didn’t know each other, texting each other from the other side of the aisles,” Harry said. “There’s people looking at me, giving me all these weird looks, and coming up to me and saying hi.” He said that he ducked below his baseball cap and tried to stay incognito while simultaneously attempting to locate Meghan. He texted her to ask if he was in the right aisle and she replied, “No, you want the parchment paper!” And the rest is history. Next up, will baby Sussex be a Diana, an Allegra, or an Artemis?
