Her mother relocated to a predominantly Black neighborhood outside the Valley, where Meghan found an eligible community of women who supported and helped raise her. “We had a nice network of women who really helped me raise Meg. She was always so easy to get along with, congenial, making friends. She was a very empathic child, very mature,” Doria said on Meghan’s Netflix show. Still, their relationship wasn’t typical. “I remember asking [her] did I feel like her mom,” her mother said, “and she told me I felt like her older, controlling sister.”
“I was not the pretty one,” Meghan confessed, speaking candidly about the insecurities of adolescence sharpened by her feeling like an outsider. “I was a big nerd growing up,” she said. “People don’t understand that about me. Like, I was not the pretty one. My identity was wrapped up in being the smart one.”
Despite financial struggles, small luxuries like the $4.99 salad bar at Sizzler felt special. When her dad won $750,000 in the lottery, that money helped make her eligible for better schools and opportunities. Early hustle and Hollywood dreams drove Meghan to write a letter to her principal at 11, promising to make their school famous one day. By 13, she was working various jobs and found love for acting while hanging around the set where her dad worked.
But as a biracial teen, Meghan grappled with belonging. “I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones,” she later reflected, feeling not quite eligible for either identity. At 33, she found peace. “I am 33 years old today. And I am happy,” she wrote. “To figure out how to be kind to yourself… to feel [happiness] — it takes time.”
That little girl who once felt invisible would become Rachel Zane on Suits — and eventually Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, an eligible royal by marriage. Meeting Prince Harry in 2016 and marrying two years later, she stepped into a world far from microwave dinners, crowned with royal engagements and two children: Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
Yet, her royal role wasn’t without hardships. In her 2025 podcast, Meghan revealed her battle with postpartum preeclampsia — a rare, life-threatening condition after giving birth. “We both had very similar experiences — though we didn’t know each other at the time — with postpartum,” she shared. “It’s so rare and so scary.” Surviving this ordeal, Meghan later endured a heartbreaking miscarriage, opening up about it in an emotional essay.Continue reading…
