Meghan Markle she has never stopped moving forward, even when the ground beneath her has moved repeatedly and without warning. In recent years, she has launched a lifestyle brand, pursued independent creative ventures and built a public identity completely separate from the royal institution she left behind. And this week, she is in the UK for the first time in four years, having made a private family visit with her two children, Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, meeting King Charles and Queen Camilla at Highgrove House, The Telegraph reports. Years before that happened, Meghan wrote a piece that still stands as the most honest description of how she’s ever acted.Quote of the day says, “You draw your own box. You present yourself as you are. Create the identity you want for yourself.”
Meaning of Meghan Markle’s quote of the day
Meghan Markle wrote these words in an essay entitled “I am more than another”, published in Elle UK. She was writing about her experience of growing up biracial in America, of being asked throughout her life to check a box that never quite fit, of existing in the space between categories that other people insisted on placing her in. The essay predates her relationship with Prince Harry, her entry into the British royal family and all the scrutiny and controversy that followed. She wrote her as a woman trying to articulate something true about her own experience of identity, before the world had much of an opinion about who she was.
Meghan’s quote reflects her belief in creating your own identity and staying true to yourself despite outside opinions. Image credit (Instagram).
The phrase “draw your own box” is the most radical part of the quote. The box, according to Meghan’s explanation, is not something imposed on you by a form or an institution or someone else’s assumptions. It’s something you draw yourself. You decide what it contains. You decide what to exclude. You present yourself not as what you appear to be, not as what the census category demands, not as what anyone’s expectations have already decided, but as who you really are. And then you create the identity you want for yourself, not the one you were handed, or the one you inherited, or the one that fits most perfectly with whatever system is asking you the question.For a woman who has spent six years being defined, relentlessly and often reductively, by forces entirely outside herself, this quote functions almost as a foundational document. The institution she married into had its own box. The British press had its own box. The Internet had its own box. And in the years since she left royal life, she has tried, with varying degrees of success and under extraordinary scrutiny, to draw her own box.She has spoken about this tension directly in her documentary series ‘Harry and Meghan’, in which she describes the experience of feeling erased within an institution that had its own rigid ideas about who she was allowed to be. The essay she wrote before all this happened now reads like a blueprint for the same coming conflict: a woman who had already decided she would draw her own box, entering a world that had been drawing boxes for centuries and had no intention of stopping.
The former Suits star has spoken often about identity, resilience and the importance of defining your own path in life. Image credit (Instagram).
Meghan Markle’s early years
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. She has described growing up biracial in Los Angeles as a perpetual in-between experience, of being too light for one community and too dark for another, of constantly asking to fit into categories that were never constructed with her in mind. This experience is the direct source of the Elle UK essay and the quote that has survived.
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 on 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 went public.
Since retiring from royal duties, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have focused on building an independent life and pursuing 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 number of independent creative and entrepreneurial projects, including a documentary series, a memoir with Harry titled ‘Spare’, a podcast series and a lifestyle venture, all while navigating one of the second-most publicly scrutinized acts any public figure has attempted in recent memory.She, by definition, still draws her own box. The visit to Britain this week, private and deliberately low-key, with no public appearances or official engagements, is in its own way the latest expression of that same principle. On their own terms. Like who she is. Not like anyone else’s idea of who it should be.