Meghan Markle never stopped moving forward, even when the ground beneath him was shifting without warning. In recent years, she has launched a lifestyle brand, pursued independent creative ventures, and established a public identity completely separate from the royal institution she left behind. And this week, she was in the United Kingdom for the first time in four years, making a private family visit with her two children, Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, reuniting with King Charles and Queen Camilla at Highgrove House, as reported by The Telegraph. Years before any of this started, Meghan wrote a piece that continues to rise to the surface as the most honest description of how she’s always operated.The quote of the day reads:, “You draw your own box. You identify yourself as who you are. You create the identity you want for yourself.”
Meaning of Meghan Markle’s quote of the day
Meghan Markle wrote these words in an essay titled ‘I’m More than an Other,’ published in Elle UK. He writes about his experience growing up biracial in America, being asked his whole life to check a box he never fit in, existing in the space between the categories other people forced him into. She wrote it as a woman trying to express something true about her own birth experience, before the world had so many opinions about who she was.
Meghan’s quote shows her belief in creating your own identity and staying true to yourself despite outside opinions. Image credit (Instagram).
The phrase “drawing your own box” is the most radical part of the quote. The box, as Meghan says, is not something imposed on you by some form or institution or someone else’s assumptions. This is something you draw yourself. You decide what it contains. You decide what is excluded. You define yourself not by what you look like, not by what the census category asks for, not by what others have already decided, but by who you really are. And then you create the identity you want for yourself, not the one handed down to you, not the one inherited, not the one that best fits whatever system begs the question.For a woman who spent six years defined, relentlessly and often reductively, by forces outside of herself, this quote acts almost as a construction document. The institution he married has its own box. The British press has its own box. The internet has its own box. And in the years since he left the royal life, he tried, with varying degrees of success and under extraordinary scrutiny, to draw his own box.He spoke about this tension directly in his documentary series ‘Harry and Meghan,’ in which he describes the experience of feeling removed from within an institution that has its own strict ideas about who he is allowed to be. The essay he wrote before anything happened today reads like a blueprint for the conflict to come. a woman who has decided that she will draw her own box, entering 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 determining your own path in life. Image credit (Instagram).
Meghan Markle’s early life
Rachel Meghan Markle was born on August 4, 1981, in Los Angeles, California, to Thomas Markle, who is white, and Doria Ragland, who is Black, according to IMDb. He describes growing up biracial in Los Angeles as an experience of endless association, of being too light for one community and too dark for another, always being asked to find himself within categories that were never established in his mind. That experience is the direct source of the Elle UK essay and the quote that survives it.
Meghan Markle’s rise to fame
She studied international relations and theater at Northwestern University before pursuing an acting career, eventually landing the role of paralegal Rachel Zane in the legal drama ‘Suits,’ which ran from 2011 to 2018 and made her a recognizable 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, before shutting 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 an independent life and running their own businesses. Image credit (Instagram).
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s relationship
She and Harry married at Windsor Castle in May 2018. Their son Archie was born in May 2019 and their daughter Lilibet in June 2021. The couple announced their decision to step back from senior royal duties in January 2020 and moved permanently to California. Since then, Meghan has pursued a variety of independent creative and business projects, including a documentary series, a memoir with Harry titled ‘Spare,’ a podcast series, and a life event, while navigating one of the most publicly scrutinized second acts attempted by any person in recent memory.He is, in any sense, still drawing his own box. This week’s visit to Britain, private and deliberately low-key, with no public appearances and no official engagements, is in its own way the latest expression of the same principle. On his own terms. As who he is. Not like anyone else’s idea of who he is.