Meghan Markle’s sob story: Courageous or crafty?

Meghan Markle has certainly set the cat among the palace pigeons. With her interview to Oprah Winfrey going viral, she has firmly declared her side of the story, dividing the globe into those who believe her and those who don’t.

The question on everyone’s lips is: was this a genuine outpouring of suppressed emotions or is she packaging herself in time for the woke market? No one is unaware of the solvent futures that will open up for the former actress, who is somewhat at a crossroads on the career front.

Praise and criticism came in thick and fast, with almost everyone taking positions – for or against – on her accounts of coldness and racism from the British royal family. As a spokesperson for colour inequality or even as a healer of psyches, she can, if she wants to, take the world stage by storm with her bi-racial genes and palace past.

By picking up two flammable phrases – race and mental health – she just might be trying to force-fit her experiences, however real, to relevant issues of the day though. Evangelical or opportunistic, the world media is undecided.

Most of us have faced racism in some form or the other; some have even suffered reverse racism. We are all damaged in some way and try to get on with life anyway, that’s the human lot. To deliberately open up our life as if a book and read out selective chapters may shine the light on subjective self-serving truths rather than universal ones.

Of course, mental health can never be judged by shiny dresses or the gems in one’s heirloom earrings. Fairy tales are just stories. There was no one there for her, she says, and that is her truth. But her own father in an interview that soon followed hers placed the blame for her depression squarely on her husband’s shoulders. Prince Harry wasn’t supportive enough, he implied, when the duchess went through her bad days. Plus, she had already ghosted her own family.