In a new interview with GQ magazine, he admitted to having social anxiety and said it started about 15 years ago, around the time of the group’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” album.
“I was diagnosed with this social thing. I didn’t notice it until I became an entertainer,” Andre explained. “I don’t know if it’s the shock of all kinds of people coming up to you or the expectations, but I got to this place where it was hard for me to be in public without feeling watched or really nervous … And it started to bleed over into my normal life. I’d just meet new people, and I would freak out or have to leave.”
Andre also said that he was reluctant to tell his friends about having social anxiety because he didn’t want to seem like a weak link among them. Instead, he started to spend more time by himself and eventually stopped touring with Outkast.
Prior to that, the group hadn’t been on a major tour in over a decade, and Andre’s partner Big Boi had to record and play shows alone. But Big Boi never bad mouthed Andre as a result or aired dirty laundry, which some may say he deserves huge credit for.
Another reason that Andre stepped away from music has to do with the death of his mother Sharon Benjamin-Hodo, who passed away from natural causes in 2013. His father Lawrence Walker also died in February 2014 of a heart attack.
Since then, the rapper said he’s been in a rut and often sat around his Atlanta home and didn’t do much. At the same time, he would come up with all of these wonderful ideas that he would never be able to complete.
“I was in all three holes,” he said. “I was in a creative hole, a personal hole and I was still not dealing with my mom and my father’s deaths. And really, I don’t know if I have still … The problem with being successful is you can do whatever you do times ten and no one to stop you. You can easily go down the wrong path and you get into that place, and the thing that brings you out is other people.”
The “Hey Ya!” creator also said the mourning of his father was twofold, because of the way he died.
“When my dad passed away, there was mourning for him dying, but there was a whole ’nother wave of mourning because I realized, ‘Whoa, he died in his house alone.’ And I wondered, ‘Had he done everything he wanted to do?’”
Article Appeared @http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/10/30/andre-3000-talks-battling-social-anxiety-outkast-death-parents/