The Duchess of York’s Transformation
The Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, at the beginning of the summer had revealed that she had undergone surgery for breast cancer. Now the ex-wife of Prince Andrew is doing well, so much so that at the beginning of August she confessed that she sees her new reconstructed breast, baptized by her as Derek, as “a friend who saved my life”.
From Self-Criticism to Self-Love
The disease, however, has operated transformations in Sarah that do not limit exclusively to the physical plane. Cancer, as she herself has told in her podcast Tea Talks, has helped her to love herself and to give value to herself after years of self-criticism: “I stopped hating myself, I stopped doubting myself. Was the disease necessary for this to happen? In my case yes. Maybe because I was always compared to Diana”.
The Bond with Diana
And from those continuous comparisons Fergie the Red came out regularly with broken bones, as she herself had told People a couple of years ago: “In the eighties there was the beautiful Diana and then there was the fat and ungainly Fergie. We had been labeled as “the saint” and “the sinner”. Despite all the attacks we managed to stay united. Even if there are still those who write the opposite”. In spite of the continuous comparisons, Sarah’s relationship with Diana – who died exactly twenty-six years ago, on August 31, 1997, at only 36 years old – has always been excellent. The two were friends since adolescence and it was Diana who presented Sarah to Prince Andrew of York. “When I saw him I exclaimed: “Oh, he is really very beautiful”. And she answered me: “Wow, Fergs!”, using the nickname with which she affectionately called her (Sarah, on her part, had nicknamed her Duchs). The two were destined to be friends. Their mothers were, they had gone to school together. And they had known each other long before becoming wives of the two royal brothers Charles and Andrew. When they met again in 1980, Diana was 19 years old (and the following year she would marry Charles, then Prince of Wales), Sarah 21. The two young women shared friends and interests, and soon began to have lunch together every week. “She was my best friend and the funniest person I knew,” Sarah had told some years ago. The bond with Diana remained very strong but the continuous criticism, comparisons and cruel jokes with which Fergie was targeted for years could not have no effect on her self-esteem. Paradoxically, the duchess has overcome everything, and has started to believe in herself, in the most difficult moment: when she had to face cancer. And now that she has defeated it, she wanted to publicly thank, in her podcast, the sister who convinced her not to postpone a gynecological check-up: “That conversation saved my life”.
