Meghan Markle opened up about the difficult year, 2020. Yes, the 39-year-old Duchess of Sussex revealed how her miscarriage helped her understand the importance of family and friends. She recalled when she was in the hospital with her husband, Prince Harry, watching his “heartbreak as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine,” that she “realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, ‘Are you OK?'”
“I recalled a moment last year when Harry and I were finishing up a long tour in South Africa. I was exhausted. I was breastfeeding our infant son, and I was trying to keep a brave face in the very public eye,” Meghan writes. “‘Are you OK?’ a journalist asked me. I answered him honestly, not knowing that what I said would resonate with so many — new moms and older ones, and anyone who had, in their own way, been silently suffering.”
“My off-the-cuff reply seemed to give people permission to speak their truth. But it wasn’t responding honestly that helped me most, it was the question itself,” she continues. “‘Thank you for asking,’ I said. ‘Not many people have asked if I’m OK.'”
Considering the Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-19, and political strife Markle said that “this year has brought so many of us to our breaking points.”
“Loss and pain have plagued every one of us in 2020, in moments both fraught and debilitating,” she writes. “We’ve heard all the stories: A woman starts her day, as normal as any other, but then receives a call that she’s lost her elderly mother to Covid-19. A man wakes feeling fine, maybe a little sluggish, but nothing out of the ordinary. He tests positive for the coronavirus and within weeks, he — like hundreds of thousands of others — has died.”
“A young woman named Breonna Taylor goes to sleep, just as she’s done every night before, but she doesn’t live to see the morning because a police raid turns horribly wrong,” she continues. “George Floyd leaves a convenience store, not realizing he will take his last breath under the weight of someone’s knee, and in his final moments, calls out for his mom.”
“We aren’t just fighting over our opinions of facts; we are polarized over whether the fact is, in fact, a fact. We are at odds over whether science is real. We are at odds over whether an election has been won or lost. We are at odds over the value of compromise,” she writes. “That polarization, coupled with the social isolation required to fight this pandemic, has left us feeling more alone than ever.”
“Many of us separated from our loved ones, alone, sick, scared, divided and perhaps struggling to find something, anything, to be grateful for,” she encouraged people to keep asking their loved ones if they are okay.
“As much as we may disagree, as physically distanced as we may be, the truth is that we are more connected than ever because of all we have individually and collectively endured this year,” she writes. “We are adjusting to a new normal where faces are concealed by masks, but it’s forcing us to look into one another’s eyes — sometimes filled with warmth, other times with tears. For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another.”
“Are we OK?” she asks. “We will be.” For more updates on Royal, keep watching this space.