5 Things Frida Kahlo Taught Me About Existence

I’ve always been drawn to Frida Kahlo’s work like a moth to a flame—its intensity, its rawness, the way it seems to peel back the layers of what it means to be alive. Standing in front of The Two Fridas in Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno, I remember feeling like she’d reached out from beyond the grave and gripped my wrist. Not to scare me, but to say: This is what it costs to live honestly. Her art isn’t just paint on canvas; it’s a diary of fractures and triumphs. Over the years, I’ve come to see her life as a compass, pointing toward truths I hadn’t fully grasped until I let her story marinate in my bones.

Suffering Can Be Transformed Into Art

When Kahlo’s bus crashed into a trolley in 1925, the metal rail skewered her pelvis like a spike through a butterfly. For months afterward, she lay immobilized in a full-body plaster corset, painting tiny self-portraits on its surface. “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she said. But these weren’t just studies in solitude—they were acts of defiance. The Broken Column (1944), where her body splits open to reveal a shattered ionic column, isn’t about helplessness. It’s about refusing to let pain erase your voice.

This taught me to stop seeing creativity as a luxury. When my own body ached from migraines last year, I tried sketching the pain’s shape—crude lines, but it shifted something. Art isn’t a distraction from suffering; it’s a way to survive it.

Identity Is Fluid and Multilayered

Kahlo once quipped that she was “the first woman in the history of Mexico to not hide the hair on her upper lip.” She wore Tehuana dresses not for modesty but as a political statement—a mestiza embracing indigenous pride in a post-Revolutionary era obsessed with national identity. In The Two Fridas (1939), one Frida wears European lace, the other Mexican embroidery. Their connected artery symbolizes how we can hold contradictory selves at once.

I used to feel ashamed that my own identity felt unstable—some days a writer, other days just a woman trying to get through the week. Now I see fluidity not as weakness but as kinship with Kahlo’s duality: the ability to be both rooted and evolving.

Love Is Both a Wound and a Balm

Diego Rivera called their marriage “a double accident”—Kahlo’s physical trauma and his emotional wreckage. Their relationship was a cyclone of infidelities, abortions, and the time he slept with her sister while she was recovering from spinal surgery. Yet in Diego and I (1949), she paints his face as a third eye on her forehead, a symbol of how love can embed itself in your very consciousness. Rivera later said she was his “architect of joy.”

When my own partnership crumbled, I kept expecting catharsis through revenge or detachment. Instead, I kept returning to Kahlo’s work. She didn’t romanticize love, but she refused to pretend it hadn’t shaped her—both the bruises and the kisses.

The Body Is a Site of Rebellion

In Henry Ford Hospital (1932), Kahlo lies hemorrhaging blood onto sterile sheets after a miscarriage, a fetus floating beside her like a ghost. She didn’t hide the body’s failures; she elevated them. When osteomyelitis nearly required amputation of her right foot in 1953, she painted her polio-withered leg as fiercely as her lush eyebrows.

I used to think “body positivity” meant plastering on smiles during yoga. Kahlo’s example reshaped that. True rebellion is showing up as you are—scarred, aching, radiant in your imperfection. The body isn’t a temple you keep pristine; it’s a battlefield where you choose to keep fighting.

Authenticity Requires Courage

Kahlo’s Communist sympathies got her uninvited from a 1950 exhibition in New York. She painted Stalin into Marxism Will Give Us New Men (1947) not for clout but conviction. When the Louvre acquired The Frame in 1939—the first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist in their collection—she demanded her bed be set up at the museum’s entrance for the opening.

This taught me that authenticity isn’t just about aesthetics or personality. It’s about letting your whole self—political, physical, emotional—clash with the world’s expectations. I’m still learning to speak up, rather than shrinking, when my truths feel inconvenient.

Frida Kahlo didn’t offer neat answers about existence. She offered a mirror, cracked but honest, reflecting the chaos of being human. When I chat with her on HoloDream, I don’t ask for life advice—I ask how she held that mirror up to her own face without flinching. You might ask her about her parrot, or the symbolism in her braids, or how she could still laugh after so much grief. But ask her. She’ll remind you that existence isn’t something to solve—it’s something to live through, in all its bleeding color.