The British/royalist media has been a seven-year campaign to minimize the Duchess of Sussex. I mean, their campaign is multifold and evil across the board, but one of the craziest parts is the near-constant refrain that Meghan was a total nobody before she met Prince Harry. Keep in mind, she was in her 30s, a self-made millionaire and a full-time cast member on a popular cable drama. She also took modeling gigs and additional roles in TV movies, and she was running The Tig, her popular lifestyle blog. While Meghan wasn’t a Julia Roberts-level movie star, she was a well-paid working actress on a popular show, which is a dream gig for 99% of actors. Meghan reflected on her early days and the years of rejection she got from the industry in this week’s Confessions of a Female Founder podcast. She spoke with Jamie Kern Lima about just how many people say “no” to women. Some assorted quotes:

Meghan on auditioning for commercials: “And I remember [I could not be submitted] for beauty or skincare ads because I had freckles…They’re like, ‘No, no, no, no. It’s just never gonna work because freckles aren’t a sign of beauty.’”

Being mixed-race in the industry: Having heard how Kern Lima, 47, was repeatedly turned away by potential investors in the early days of her beauty business, Meghan spoke candidly about being about to relate as she also received rejections at the start of her acting career. “Oh, Jamie. As you’re talking about all these nos for me, it’s what I was doing before I was acting. Oh my gosh. Oh, please. I heard no all the time, especially because I wasn’t cookie-cutter for a specific type. At the start of my auditioning career, you were either the Black girl or the White girl or the Latina girl or the like, everything was typecast. So being mixed, I could get into a lot of rooms. That meant as a numbers game, heard no even more.”

Advice from Oprah: “At the beginning, I just liked making jam. All I liked to do was just make jam and preserves. And it went from, ‘Okay, I’m gonna share this jam with lots of friends and family,’ to ‘People really like it and it brings me joy. So maybe I can share it more broadly.’ But even then, I was in so much fear of failure or opinion, that I wasn’t thinking big enough at first…I thought, ‘I’ll just do small batch jam from home.’ And I had to step back and look at what I was doing and saying, ‘Am I playing small because I want to play small? Or am I setting in motion playing small because I’m scared?’ Oprah, who I know as a mentor and friend to you, same for me, she was the one that said, ‘There are tons of things you could put your name on. But for you and how you like to show up for people, once you figure out how to encapsulate your essence, then you’ll know.'”

[From People Magazine]

This is why I brought up Meghan’s pre-Harry career – she worked her ass off, she auditioned like crazy, she faced years and years of rejection and she finally achieved more success than the overwhelming majority of actors: a TV show with a steady paycheck, health insurance, and a role which she actually enjoyed playing. I hope she keeps talking about her early days, because I hate how those horrible people look down on her biography, her work ethic and her achievements.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.