The Duchess of Sussex has long encouraged people to define themselves on their own terms rather than by others’ expectations.Image credit (Instagram)​
Meghan Markle has never stopped moving forward, even when the ground beneath her has shifted repeatedly and without warning. In recent years, she has launched a lifestyle brand, pursued independent creative ventures, and built a public identity entirely separate from the royal institution she left behind. And this week, she is in the United Kingdom for the first time in four years, having made 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 began, Meghan wrote a piece that keeps surfacing as the most honest description of how she has always operated.The quote of the day reads, “You draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are. You create the identity you want for yourself.”
Meaning of the quote of the day by Meghan Markle
Meghan Markle wrote these words in an essay titled ‘I’m More Than an Other,’ 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 of the scrutiny and controversy that followed. She wrote it 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, in Meghan’s telling, is not something imposed on you by a form or an institution or another person’s assumptions. It is something you draw yourself. You decide what it contains. You decide what it excludes. You introduce yourself not as what you appear to be, not as what the census category demands, not as what anyone else’s expectations have already decided, but as who you actually are. And then you create the identity you want for yourself, not the one handed to you, not the one inherited, not the one that fits most neatly into whatever system is asking 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 founding 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 departed from royal life, she has attempted, 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 described 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 any of that happened now reads like a blueprint for the very conflict that was coming: a woman who had already decided she would draw her own box, entering a world that had been drawing boxes for centuries and did not intend to stop.
The former Suits star has often spoken about identity, resilience and the importance of defining your own path in life.Image credit (Instagram)​​
Early life of Meghan Markle
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 an experience of perpetual in-betweenness, of being too light for one community and too dark for another, of being asked constantly to locate herself within categories that were never built with her in mind. That experience is the direct source of the Elle UK essay and of the quote that has endured from it.
Meghan Markle’s rise to fame
She studied international relations and theatre 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 recognisable 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 back from royal duties, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have focused on building an independent life and pursuing their own ventures.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 relocated permanently to California. Since then, Meghan has pursued a range 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 most publicly scrutinised second acts any public figure has attempted in recent memory.She is, by any definition, still drawing her own box. The visit to Britain this week, private and deliberately low-key, with no public appearances and no official engagements, is in its own way the latest expression of that same principle. On her own terms. As who she is. Not as anyone else’s idea of who she should be. Go to Source
