meghan markle Even as the ground beneath her feet shifted repeatedly without warning, she never stopped moving forward. In recent years, she has launched a lifestyle brand, pursued an independent creative career and established a public image entirely independent of the royal institution she left behind. This week she came to the UK for the first time in four years, bringing her two children – Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five – for a private family visit and a reunion with King Charles and Queen Camilla at Highgrove Palace, according to The Daily Telegraph. A few years before this all started, Meghan wrote an article that keeps coming back as the most honest account of how she’s always operated.The quotes for the day are as follows:, “You draw your own box. You introduce who you are. You create for yourself the identity you want. “
What Meghan Markle meant by her words that day
Meghan Markle wrote these words in an article titled “I’m not just another person” published in British magazine Elle. She writes about her experience growing up biracial in America, having been asked her entire life to check a box that never fit, to exist in the spaces between the categories that others insisted she be placed into. The article predates her relationship with Prince Harry, her entry into the British royal family, and all the scrutiny and controversy that came with it. She wrote this book as a woman in an attempt to illuminate the realities of her experience of identity, before the world had much of an idea of who she was.
Meghan’s quote reflects her belief in creating your own identity and staying true to yourself despite outside opinions. Image source (Instagram)
The phrase “draw your own box” is the most radical part of this sentence. In Megan’s words, the box is not something forced upon you by some form, some institution, or another person’s assumptions. This is something you draw yourself. You decide what it contains. You decide what it excludes. When you introduce yourself, not by who you look like, not by what a census category requires, not by what other people’s expectations have dictated, but by who you actually are. You then create for yourself the identity you want, not the identity handed to you, not the identity inherited, not the identity of whatever system is best suited to ask questions.For a woman who spent six years being defined ruthlessly and often reductively by completely external forces, these words serve almost as a founding document. The institution she married into had its own box. The British press has its own box. The Internet has its own box. In the years since she left royal life, she’s been trying to draw her own box, with varying degrees of success.She addressed this tension directly in her documentary series Harry and Meghan, in which she described the experience of feeling erased in an institution that had its own strict ideas about who she was allowed to be. The essays she wrote before all this happened now read like a blueprint for the conflict to come: a woman who has decided to draw her own box into a world that has been drawing boxes for centuries and has no intention of stopping.
The former Suits star often talks about identity, resilience and the importance of defining your own path in life. Image source (Instagram)
Meghan Markle’s early life
According to IMDb, Rachel Meghan Markle was born on August 4, 1981, in Los Angeles, California, to a white father, Thomas Markle, and a black mother, Doria Ragland. She describes growing up biracial in Los Angeles as an experience of perpetual in-between, too light for one community and too dark for another, constantly being asked to position herself in categories she had never considered. This experience was the direct source of the Elle UK article and its quotes.
Meghan Markle’s rise to fame
She studied international relations and theater at Northwestern University before pursuing a career in acting, eventually starring as paralegal Rachel Zane on the legal drama Suits, which ran from 2011 to 2018 and made her a well-known face on both sides of the Atlantic. She also ran a lifestyle blog called The Tig, which she used as a platform for travel, food and social commentary, but shut it down in 2017 shortly before her relationship with Prince Harry became public.
Since stepping down from royal duties, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have focused on building independent lives and pursuing their careers. Image source (Instagram)
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s relationship
She and Harry married in May 2018 at Windsor Castle. Their son Archie was born in May 2019, and daughter Lilibet was born in June 2021. The couple announced their decision to step down from senior royal duties in January 2020 and permanently relocate to California. Since then, Meghan has embarked on a series of independent creative and entrepreneurial projects, including a documentary series, a memoir with Harry titled Spare, a podcast series and a lifestyle venture that has led to one of the most publicized second acts a public figure has attempted in recent years.Regardless, she’s still painting her box. This week’s visit to the UK, which was private and deliberately low-key, with no public appearances and no formal events, was itself the latest manifestation of the same principle. On her own terms. Just like who she is. Not who others thought she was supposed to be.
