Every International Women’s Day, I find myself returning to Frida Kahlo.?
Not just the flower crowns or the unibrow or the merch-lined museum gift shops,?but the woman in the hospital bed, the woman in the mirror, the woman who refused to look away from her own pain. I return to her because she teaches me something about what it means to tell the truth about your life, even when it is messy,?political?and painful.?
I started painting when I was?very young. I remember being?the kind of child who asked for sketchbooks?and art supplies?instead of?toys,?and?carried pencils everywhere. Art was literally my first language?before I had the vocabulary for?feminism or theory?or critique.?But I was also a perfectionist.?
I?obsessed?over?clean lines and symmetry. I studied faces and tried to make them conventionally beautiful, focusing on?smooth skin, proportional features, soft?expressions. I avoided anything that felt “ugly,”?and I?never painted anger. I never drew bodies that looked scarred or imperfect, and?I never explored grief, jealousy,?illness?or any of the?devastations?women are often taught to swallow politely. Those topics?simply?felt taboo?to me.?
Because of this,?my?art?stopped feeling like freedom?to create?and?instead?started feeling like a test.?
By my sophomore year of high school, I quit. Not dramatically,?just slowly. I told myself I was too busy?or that?I had outgrown it,?but the truth was that my perfectionism had made art unbearable and no longer rewarding. If I couldn’t create something beautiful in a mainstream sense, I didn’t want to at all.?足彩app哪个是正规的n I?was introduced to?Frida Kahlo.?
When I initially?looked at her self-portraits, I felt unsettled.?足彩app哪个是正规的 first piece of hers I ever saw was “足彩app哪个是正规的 Broken Column,” where?her body is split?open?and?her spine?is?replaced with a crumbling pillar. Nails puncture her skin, and tears fall down her face.?Instead of hiding?her pain,?she frames and?centers it. She looks directly at the viewer with a steady, almost confrontational gaze.
Kahlo, who survived polio, a?near-fatal bus?accident?and chronic pain for most of her life, painted what hurt. She painted miscarriages,?blood,?hospital beds,?back braces, facial hair and bodies unidealized by mainstream media. In a world that preferred women as muses?(especially women married to powerful men like?her husband, Mexican muralist?Diego Rivera),?she insisted on being the subject.?
As a Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies student, I have learned the phrase “the personal is political.” But Kahlo?is the one who?showed me what?it?looks like on?canvas. Her self-portraits are not confessions for the sake of?spectacle; they are acts of reclamation. She?is the one who decides how her body is seen?and?what parts of her story are visible. She transformed her?pain into?authorship, and?watching her do that felt like permission?to do it myself.?
I realized that my refusal to paint anything “ugly”?was about?fear, not just aesthetics. Fear of being judged,?revealing too much,?or?of disrupting the expectation that women should be composed and?digestible.?I realized that if Kahlo could paint a fractured spine and make it art, I?had?no reason to censor?my own inner world.?
Slowly, I returned to drawing. At first, it was tentative?with?looser lines?and?less erasing. 足彩app哪个是正规的n I began experimenting with themes I had once avoided. I?painted?my own?tired eyes, bodies that took up space, and I sketched a brutally raw self-portrait of my own that exaggerated my features I had?specifically?deemed as?flaws.?I stopped asking, “Is this beautiful?” and started asking, “Is this honest?”?It was incredibly?freeing!?
International Women’s Day often celebrates resilience and achievement, and Kahlo certainly embodies both. But what I honor most about her is her refusal to sanitize her experience. She did not flatten herself into inspiration. She allowed contradictions of?softness and rage, devotion and defiance. She claimed her Mexican identity, her politics, her bisexual desire and?her disability. Doing so, she made?immense?space for complexity, and she made space for me?and every other young girl under the influence of toxic perfectionism.?
Art is?still?my personal hobby,?but now it?feels less like performance and more like dialogue between my inner life and the canvas, between the expectations placed on women and the realities we live. Kahlo taught me that vulnerability is?a form of resistance, not?weakness.?
On this International Women’s Day?on March 8, I am grateful not only for what Frida Kahlo contributed to art history but for what she gave me personally: the courage to create without apology,?to let imperfection exist?and?to paint what hurts.?
I used to think art had to be beautiful to matter. Now I know it just?has to?be true.?
Karma Nashed is an undergraduate student at the University of Washington Bothell majoring in Psychology with a minor in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Her writing during her college career has explored feminist theory, voice?and the politics of storytelling. She is the author of “Pramila Jayapal,” a biography that appears in?Badass Womxn and Enbies in the Pacific Northwest Volume 3.?She is especially interested in how art and literature create space for marginalized narratives.?After graduation, she hopes to?work in counseling and to continue using art as a form of expression.??
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