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Princess Diana was one of the most beloved and iconic royals in modern history. But behind the fairy-tale image, lies a far darker story. Long before the paparazzi, royal scandals, and the tragic Paris car crash that shocked the world, Diana's life was marked by loneliness, heartbreak, and immense pressure.
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Whether it's her looking surprised by the world's attention, or holding the hand of a man dying of AIDS in the 1980s, when most people were afraid to
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there's an idea of Diana, Princess of Wales, that will live forever in our hearts
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But if you go all the way back, what you find is not a fairy tale
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It's a slow, quiet tragedy that began long before the paparazzi chased her car into a Paris tunnel
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And that's why. Today, we're taking a look at why Princess Diana's life was a tragedy before she died
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Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1, 1961 at Park House on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, England
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Her parents, Viscount Altrup, John Spencer, and Frances Shand Kidd were aristocrats
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and they lived the sort of life that was in constant orbit of the same rarefied social universe as the royal family
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But while it might have looked charmed from the outside, cracks had already formed long before Diana was born
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When she was six, her parents' marriage imploded. Their divorce in 1967 was bitter and public
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Custody battles were fought and accusations were thrown. To biographer Andrew Morton, she would later say
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It was a very unhappy childhood, always seeing our mom crying. Daddy never spoke to us about it
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We could never ask questions. Very unstable, the whole thing. Diana and her siblings were largely raised by a rotating cast of nannies
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Some were young. Some were, in Diana's mind, too pretty. She would later suspect that some of these women were more than caretakers to her father
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Whether that was true or not almost doesn't matter. What matters is that she felt replaced again and again
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At 14, she felt adrift. She wasn't academically gifted or especially confident
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She didn't believe she had talents and often described herself as a burden
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or an irritant, someone who was in the way. And there was another shadow hanging over her birth
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the death of her older brother, John, in 1960. He had lived just 10 hours, but her parents had
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desperately wanted a male heir. Diana would later internalize the idea that her arrival
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a girl, had disappointed them. It's impossible to know exactly how much of that belief was true
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and how much was a child constructing a story to explain adult grief
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But children don't need proof. They need only a feeling. And Diana's feeling was that she wasn't quite what anyone wanted
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In 1975, when Diana was 14, everything shifted again. Her father inherited the title Earl Spencer
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as well as the massive Altrip estate in Northamptonshire On paper this should have felt like an upgrade This grand ancestral home with generations of history But for Diana it was just another change
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Around the same time, her father started seeing Rain, Countess of Dartmouth, the woman who would become her stepmother
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Diana and her siblings absolutely hated Rain. Not in a mild teenage eye roll way
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In a real, you're stealing our father from us and tearing our family apart sort of way
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Whether that was fair or not was almost irrelevant. Diana already had abandonment issues from her
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parents' divorce, and now there was another woman moving into the center of her father's life
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Then in 1978, her father suffered a brain hemorrhage. For a while, it looked terminal
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and during that time, Rain reportedly wouldn't let Diana or her siblings visit him at the hospital
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taking all the control for herself. Imagine being a teenager, already insecure from everything being
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a teenager entails. And on top of that, you're being blocked from seeing your possibly dying
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father. Yeah, not fun. One of Diana's sisters eventually managed to see him and later said
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the hemorrhage had changed him completely. She would later say, he was one person before and he
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was certainly a different person afterwards. So now Diana didn't just feel emotionally distant
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from her parents. She felt like she lost the version of her father she knew. School wasn't
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exactly helping either. She attended West Heath Girl School in Kent, and academically, she struggled
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She failed her O-levels twice, and in the British system at the time, that was basically a public
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stamp that said, not good enough. So at 16, she left school for good. She did a stint at a Swiss
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finishing school, the Institut Alpand Bidemenet. But that wasn't really about education. It was more
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about etiquette and how to glide into a room without spilling your tea. When she moved to
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London, she had to learn how to take care of herself and began working normal, low-paying
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jobs. Jobs like cleaning houses or working as a nanny. There's something almost surreal about
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the future Princess of Wales wiping down tables and supervising nap time, but at the moment
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she was just another young woman trying to find her footing. And then she met the future king
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Diana first met Charles III in 1977 when he was dating her older sister
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Yes, it sounds like the start of a soap opera, but that's what happened. That sister, Sarah, reportedly said she liked Charles, but couldn't marry him because she wasn't in love with him
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So a few years later, Charles turned his attention to Diana. By 1980, they were seeing each other seriously, even though she was 19 and he was 31
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Even without such a significant age gap there was the simple fact that she was a shy inexperienced woman still figuring herself out and he was the heir to the British throne carrying centuries of expectation Then in February 1981 he proposed
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and almost overnight, Diana's life stopped being her own. She quit her preschool job and moved into
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Buckingham Palace. Biographers would later describe that period as incredibly lonely. She went from sharing a London flat with roommates to living in one of the most famous
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buildings in the world, surrounded by a well-intentioned staff that simply didn't know
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what to make of the young Diana. She had no peers or equals, nobody that even really understood her
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The royal wedding in July 1981 was marketed as a fairy tale. Hundreds of millions tuned in to
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watch Diana in her enormous dress become who would later be called the People's Princess
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But the pressure started immediately. By November, it was announced she was pregnant
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Twelve weeks into that pregnancy, she threw herself down a flight of stairs
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The baby, Prince William, was fine. Years later, she admitted she did it intentionally
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This is obviously an incredibly difficult topic to talk about, as it's impossible to know what was going on in Diana's head
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We do, however, know that she would later say that she felt so inadequate
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And that word keeps coming back with her. After William was born in 1982, she struggled with postpartum depression
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Around this time, her bulimia worsened. She later described it as a symptom of what was happening in her marriage
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I had bulimia for a number of years. You inflicted upon yourself because your self-esteem was to low ebb
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and you don't think you're worthy or valuable. The palace wasn't built for emotional fragility
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It was built for endurance. And Diana was cracking under it. I felt compelled to perform
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Publicly, Diana was thriving. She was young, glamorous, warm, and unlike many in the royal family
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she hugged the public and seemed genuinely excited to see them. Maybe part of that is because she understood how they felt or where they came from
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She was human in a way that almost felt alien when surrounded by other royalty
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From the outside, it looked like everything was working out perfectly for Diana
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She was beloved by the public and press, with a humble story that felt like it was out of a children's storybook
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Privately, however, the marriage was unraveling. Charles had a long history with Camilla Parker Bowles
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and by the mid-1980s, that relationship had resumed. Diana, hurt and isolated, began an affair with her riding instructor, James Hewitt
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While this might have been unfortunate, but run-of-the-mill in suburban America, this wasn't just a troubled marriage
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It was a media feeding frenzy waiting to happen This was the royal family and these were heirs to the throne and public figures that represent something bigger than themselves By 1987 the tabloids were openly talking about it
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Every appearance was yzed, every facial expression dissected. The narrative of the
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unhappy princess started to take shape. In 1989, Diana confronted Camilla at a party
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Diana told her she knew what was going on. Camilla reportedly responded that Diana had everything she could ever want
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Only, Diana didn't. Around this time, Diana secretly recorded tapes that would later be used by biographer Andrew Morton
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In them, she spoke openly about her suicide attempts, her bulimia, and the emotional coldness of her marriage
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When the book came out in 1992, it was explosive. The monarchy doesn't do public confessionals, but Diana had just blown the doors open
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In 1992, Prime Minister John Major announced to Parliament that Charles and Diana were separating
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But even that wasn't the end of it. Post-divorce, Diana had more freedom, but also less protection
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She started dating Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon. By many accounts, this was the most serious relationship she had ever had
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and friends later described him as the love of her life. He wasn't royal or flashy
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He simply treated her like a normal person. The relationship lasted about two years before ending quietly
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Diana was reportedly heartbroken. She had once again invested deeply, and once again, it didn't last
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Then came Dodi Fayyad. Their relationship was intense and extremely public. Whether it was a genuine love story or partly fueled by the spotlight is still debated
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But what's clear is this. Diana was still looking for something solid
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She'd had global fame and adoration, but never emotional safety. On August 31st, 1997, she died in a car crash in Paris alongside Dodi Fayyad
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The world reacted like it had lost something irreplaceable because it had
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However, the tragedy wasn't just the crash. It was the little girl who felt unwanted because she wasn't the son her parents had hoped for
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It was the teenager who believed she wasn't smart enough. It was the young bride who felt inadequate in a palace that didn't know how to comfort her
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It was a woman battling bulimia and depression, while the entire planet judged her body, her marriage, and her worth
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By the time she died at 36, the fairy tale had long since unraveled
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The crash ended her life. But the sadness, the loneliness, the insecurity, the feeling of not quite being enough had been there for decades
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And that's what makes her story tragic long before Paris ever entered the picture