Frida Kahlo: painting a portrait of herself inside a broken body
Severely injured at seventeen and in lifelong pain, Frida painted 140 works, a third of them self-portraits. She said: I paint my own reality, because I am the subject I know best.
In September 1925, a bus collided with a streetcar in Mexico City.
Seventeen-year-old Frida Kahlo was on board. An iron handrail went through her pelvis. The doctors did not think she would live. She was bedridden for three months, went through more than thirty operations in her life, and was never truly on her feet again.
Before the accident she had wanted to be a doctor. After it, lying in bed, her parents put a mirror on the ceiling. Her mother bought her paints and brushes and said: you cannot go out, so paint yourself.
We often think we have to wait until our body is well, until life is smooth, before we deserve to love ourselves. Frida said: even broken, you can start painting yourself.
She began to paint self-portraits.
In a lifetime of roughly 140 paintings, a third were self-portraits. She painted herself with dark, joined brows, flowers in her hair, the traditional Tehuana dress of Mexico. She painted herself lying in bed, her spine like a cracked column. She painted a broken neck on a necklace, tears falling like rain. She painted herself holding a bleeding heart in both hands.
Someone asked her: why do you paint so many of yourself?
She said: "Because I am so lonely. Because I am the subject I know best."
She painted herself not out of vanity, but because — while the whole world looked only at her wounds, she was the only one willing to sit down and really look at who that hurt person was.
Self-compassion is not telling yourself "you're amazing." It is daring to sit down and really look at the person who is least perfect.
Frida never escaped her pain. She married Diego Rivera twice, divorced him twice. She miscarried. She broke ribs. In the end her right leg was amputated for gangrene. While she was alive, her work was shown only in small exhibitions in Mexico. The fame that reached the whole world came decades after her death.
But she never lived as a victim. In her blue house in Mexico City she hosted friends, smoked, drank, laughed, argued with visiting artists and revolutionaries. Her way with pain was not to endure it in silence, but to carry it along with her.
One of her lines is now taped to walls all over the world: "I paint my own reality."
What she meant: I do not need to paint myself as a whole person. My reality is this — injured, broken, imperfect — but it is mine. I am willing to paint it, because it deserves to be seen.
Real self-love is not hiding yourself. Even if you feel broken, strange, imperfect, you dare to put it on the wall, unapologetically.
In 1954, at forty-seven, Frida was carried into her own solo exhibition on a stretcher. She asked her bed to be brought into the opening, and from it she raised a glass to her guests. It was the last time she saw her paintings.
Today her face is on Mexican banknotes, her self-portraits hang in the world's greatest museums. But what she left the world is not only the paintings.
She left a way of living: when life breaks you, you can choose to hide the pieces — or you can choose to paint each piece, as yourself.
In the end
Our generation is taught to be excellent, presentable, to look as if life is going well. Frida reminds us: you do not have to be whole. You can have cracks, pain, parts no one else understands — and that is still you, still worthy of being treated seriously, by you.
Tomorrow morning, when you look in the mirror, don't rush to point out what's wrong. That person has walked through every wound with you.