It’s been twenty-six years when Princess Diana sat down for the interview. This time the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle decided to follow the same path. Sure, the narrative is different but essentially – it’s still the same.
The time, the locations, and the details are different. And yet, you can see the shared elements between their stories: both contended with mental health struggles, unsurvivable press attention, and faux, failed fairytales.
Here are some of the similarties we found out –
1. On Joining The Royal Family
Diana: “At the age of 19, you always think you’re prepared for everything, and you think you have the knowledge of what’s coming ahead. But although I was daunted at the prospect at the time, I felt I had the support of my husband-to-be.”
Meghan: “I will say I went into it naively because I didn’t grow up knowing much about the royal family. It wasn’t something that was part of the conversation at home, it wasn’t something that we followed.
I didn’t research about what that would mean. I’ve never looked up my husband online. I just didn’t feel the need to because everything that I needed to know, he was sharing with me.”
2. On Not Receiving Any Support During Their Royal Transitions
Diana: “No one sat me down with a piece of paper and said: ‘This is what is expected of you.’ But there again, I’m lucky enough in the fact that I have found my role, and I’m very conscious of it, and I love being with people,” Diana said. “It was isolating, but it was also a situation where you couldn’t indulge in feeling sorry for yourself: you had to either sink or swim. And you had to learn that very fast.”
Meghan: “Unlike what you see in the movies, there’s no class on how to speak, how to cross your legs, how to be royal,” Meghan said as she recalled Googling the British national anthem the night before a royal engagement.
3. On Their New Job Role
The language both women used is hauntingly similar: “You think you have knowledge of what’s coming ahead,” Princess Diana told Bashir in 1995.
“I didn’t fully understand what the job was…”
“I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day,” said Diana. “I am everywhere,” Meghan echoed, years later.
4. On Struggling With Unwanted Media Attention
Diana: “The most daunting aspect was the media attention, because my husband and I, we were told when we got engaged that the media would go quietly, and it didn’t, and then when we were married they said it would go quietly and it didn’t; and then it started to focus very much on me, and I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day, which is an isolating experience, and the higher the media put you, place you, is the bigger the drop. And I was very aware of that.”
Meghan: “I would sit up at night, and I was just – I don’t understand how all of this is being churned out – and again I wasn’t seeing it – but it’s almost worse when you feel it through the expression of my mom or my friends or them calling me crying like, ‘Meg, they’re not protecting you.’ And I realized it was all happening just because I was breathing.”
5. On The Institution
Diana felt thwarted by “people in her environment.” Meghan, meanwhile, spoke of the intangible “institution.”
“I didn’t like myself. I was ashamed because I couldn’t cope with the pressures,” Diana revealed. “I was really ashamed to say it at the time,” Meghan said. “But. . . I just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
6. On Self Harm
Both women admitted they struggled with self-harm: Meghan had suicidal thoughts. (“I just didn’t see a solution,” she said.) Diana, meanwhile, suffered from postpartum depression and cut herself. (“You felt misunderstood, and just very, very low in yourself.”)
Diana: “I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful. And obviously that was daunting, because if you’ve never seen it before how do you support it?”
Meghan: “When no one listens to you, or you feel no one’s listening to you, all sorts of things start to happen.” Meghan wanted to seek treatment but she says she was told it wasn’t a feasible option.
7. On The Australia Tour
Both Diana and the Sussexes implied that their respective tours of Australia caused jealousy within the monarchy. “It all changed after the Australia tour,” Harry told Oprah.
“It was the first time the family got to see how incredible she was at the job. And that brought back memories. To see how effortless it was for Meghan to come into the family and be able to connect with people.”
Diana’s popularity on the continent was explosive. So much so that she said Charles was jealous.
Diana: “We’d be going around Australia, for instance, and all you could hear was, ‘oh, she’s on the other side.’ Now, if you’re a man like my husband, a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks. And you feel low about it, instead of feeling happy and sharing it. With the media attention came a lot of jealousy, a great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.”
8. On Why They Decided to Step Back From the Royal Family
Diana: “The pressure was intolerable then, and my job, my work was being affected. I wanted to give 110% to my work, and I could only give 50. I was constantly tired, exhausted because the pressure was just, it was so cruel. So I thought the only way to do it was to stand up and make a speech and extract myself before I started disappointing and not carrying out my work. It was my decision to make that speech because I owed it to the public to say that, you know, ‘Thank you. I’m disappearing for a bit, but I’ll come back.’”
Meghan: “We never left the family. We were saying, ‘OK, if this isn’t working for everyone, we’re in a lot of pain, you can’t provide us with the help that we need, we can just take a step back. We can do it in a commonwealth country.’ We suggested New Zealand, South Africa.”
9. On Why They Finally Chose to Speak Out
Diana: “Maybe people have a better understanding, maybe there’s a lot of women out there who suffer on the same level but in a different environment, who are unable to stand up for themselves because their self-esteem is cut into two.”
Meghan: “As an adult who lived a really independent life to then go into this construct that is different than I think what people expect it to be, it’s really liberating to be able to have the right and the privilege in some ways to be able to say yes, I’m ready to talk.”
What are your thoughts?
Full excerpt of Princess Diana interview
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