So today it was a really crazy day, I had a job interview and fortunately all went well and I have good teaching results, but this time I was honestly terrified cause I know I've been risking too much exposing myself on social networks, and also on this blog, and everywhere online, and although I consider I'm not doing anything nasty or immoral, and even less illegal, the fear is always there you know. The fear of what if I'm not giving a good image? Fortunately, as usual my fears were just fears, I keep on being considered a good professional to the best educational institution in Europe which is VIU Valencian International University, and I am more committed than ever to be the best teacher possible, already considering more formative possibilities to continue increasing my basic knowledge, my competences, and my skills, and how to transmit them to my future students in the most effective manner.
And it's almost the Witch Hour at night and I feel utterly drained and exhausted, so I need to express myself again here, cause this blog and my Insta, my Facebook etc. have become so incredibly healing for me that I now consider them my healing journals, beautiful places where I can be fully myself, show what I know and I feel, and also connect with other super beautiful souls eager to get more info, more amusement, more food for thought, more laughter, more shock, more absurdity, or simply to sneak a peek. And I won't disappoint, not even the stalkers lol.
And today I want to talk to you about my girl crush: Frida Kahlo.
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| Introducing you to the girl of my dreams 😍 Sexy, huh? 😏😑😅 |
I remember when I first saw, when I was very young, a pic of Frida Kahlo on TV, when there was still not Internet (yeppers, I'm that old). And the first thing I thought was wtf what an ugly woman. What does it make her so ugly? Obviously, those eyebrows, but there was something else. She was stylish, although her clothes were utterly unfamiliar to me, but there was something weird about her. It was as if she actually did her best to try and look ugly on purpose. Honestly, I thought she looked like a monkey in a fancy dress, cause, even if later on I came to acknowledge it, I am quite superficial, I don't care much about old age or physical appearance, but people must appear well-groomed so that I can find them attractive, fresh, clean; you know, hygienic (I'm a Virgo after all I guess?). And Frida, my girl, those eyebrows??? And the moustache?? Are you fuckin kiddin me??? Those are super easy to fix, as well as I used to fix my own moustache no biggie, even if it was just a matter of preventing bullying in class, and besides it was a question of basic enhancement of our features to make our best traits become more outstanding, an art in itself, if you let me tell you, that's why I'm so obsessed with make-up. A way to turn us a little bit more into more aesthetically pleasant beings, imo. A question of attitude.
And then, after her picture, on that TV program some of her paintings were shown, and the shock was even worse, like wtf?? Not only does she have those eyebrows, she even underlines them to the max in her self-portraits, and, seriously, is all well at home Frida my girl? Cause, some of these paintings are super sick, and not in the, um, healthy sense...?
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| My girl looks more like a monkey than the monkey beside her. Maybe the monkey was purposedly added to the painting to underline the natural monkiness of my girl? Go figure (Autorretrato con chango y loro, 1942) |
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| At first, when I saw this painting I was like Frida my girl may I get you some warm tea and a painkiller?? And then I thought about my own writings and I said oops... 😅 (La columna rota, 1944) |
And the more I knew about the girl, the more she disgusted me. I couldn't fathom the purpose of grooming yourself so kitschcally, with all those flowers in that lavish hairdo and all, if your final purpose was to show to the world how hairy you were adamant to appear. As the neurodivergent I am, it didn't make any sense to me, and what I don't make any sense of, I dislike. So yeah, that was the end of that moment in which I discovered the artist for the first time, and not being painting or painters my particular field as a teacher, I spent years without giving the author, nor any other painter to be honest, a simple thought. I remember though that once I corrected one student's assignment which included a Kahlo's painting, and I corrected him/her (I don't remember), stating that her paintings were too bizarre, some of them even too explicit to show to the primary students. And I still think so.
And after my divorce, alone in my room, and seeking as usal connections online on Insta, on Facebook, on any other platform where beautiful souls would gather and show their art to the world and I could contemplate and enjoy their art and feel closer to the most beautiful facets of human experience in all their aspects, and having already acknowledged my natural capacity for falling in love with people, with souls, regardless of gender, provided that they were good, beautiful, positive, authentic, outstanding, and of course kind and benevolent, la crème de la crème of current humanhood and its evolution as I like to say, I came across this quote here:
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And I said wow, today it's a good day on the Internet: Across time and space, and thanks to the ineffable, causal and unpredictable depths of the algorithms moving the waves of the digital oceans, Frida Kahlo is talking directly to me.
Cause, you know, I'm not delusional; I know perfectly well what fiction is and what reality is, even better than many, many other people that I know who consider themselves much saner, maybe because I know very well both worlds as a writer, and yet, that statement was what I call a Universal. A Universal is an expression of human emotion, thought, behaviour or experience that we all can relate to because, at some point, we've felt or conducted ourselves the same way. And Universals keep the artists who produced them very much alive, for that reason. Shakespeare is all based on Universals, and who dares say that Shakespeare is dead lol? No one, right? Cause he's not. As he very well knew and expressed in Sonnet 18, as long as his writings kept being read on, he and his muses would be alive. Words of truth.
And through that very same magic effect produced by the combination of human experience, emotion, thought, and the English language, throughout time and space, I literally felt as if Kahlo's words were addressed to me; to me, and to other million girls alike currently in the World, cause in spite of our idiosyncrasies, We Are One. And yet, it was my individual and personal experience, my connection with those words and the thoughts which produced them, and my reality. So yes, if we believe a little bit in weird and cool stuff like quantum entanglements, or as my man Einstein called "spooky action at a distance", and we believe that the human experience and the existence of the Soul trascends time and space, at that very moment, and, of course, if we've watched some too many reruns of Dark (2017-2020) on Netflix lol, Frida was sitting on her desk in Mexico feeling bored and longing for a friendly and authentic connection, and I was, around 80 years later in Palencia, Spain, feeling bored in front of the computer and longing for a friendly and authentic connection.
And bam, Soul contact made. We've all felt it. The resonance. The beautiful, magical feeling of having found a mirror of our limited individuality in another human experience.
And I decided to look for more info about her lol.
What I found was amazing. Frida Kahlo was born in Coyocoan, Mexico, in 1907. She suffered from very poor health in childhood (hah! That sounds familiar!), always wore long skirts to hide that she limped from having suffered, and survived, polio, which left her with one leg much weaker and thinner than the other, she was super close to her father (sounds familiar too!), and at 18 went through an accident that left her permanently injured in many senses, as regards particularly physical pain.
My girl said:
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| Sounds like someone I know with a crazy blog lol |
Kahlo married Diego Rivera, another very important Mexican painter. My dude was super big, and she looked so tiny and fragile beside him, a super cute couple. And yet they were, as we would say nowadays, more toxic than the famous Britney Spears's song. They got married in 1929, got divorced in 1940, and remarried again in the same year. A couple of eclectic, revolutionary artists, they both had plenty of affairs, she with other men and women, and he with other women, one of them Frida's own little sister Cristina and one of her closest best friends and emotional supports, which infuriated her for real. I can perfectly picture her tiny and sickly frame pursuing him around that artistic, luxurious house in Mexico and screaming on top of her lungs while he hid from her, enormous as he was, utterly terrified. That would have been an amazing scene to behold, it must have been hilarious.
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| Awww so cute. I love the vibe in this pic. You can tell these two cray-crays really loved each other💓 |
And it is fun cause my girl was so crazy about her man nevertheless that said things like "
My poor girl wanted children but couldn't have them due to the consequences of her accident when she was 18, and it wrings my heart to think of how sad she must have been because of that, and I mean years of ongoing, deep sadness and frustration, even more underscored by the fact that he did have quite a few children with other women. The relationship between these two individuals was pure and canonical love-hate, and yet they were obsessed with each other, painted continuously each other, and, when Frida fell seriously sick right before her passing, he took good, dedicated care of her, until her very last moments. According to the article "The Elephant and the Dove; A Look at Frida and Diego's Relationship", by Javier Aranda Luna writing for Google Arts & Culture, "For Frida, Diego almost became the son she never had. For Diego, he saw Frida as the young revolutionary, the painter who watched the world, the mother who protected him and knew the secret of yin and yang". Damn, sounds too familiar... As well as the fact that, judging by the pics of them both plaguing the Internet, she was as fuckin and insufferably clingy as I was with my ex lol.
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| (The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl, 1949) Dayum! This is weirder than what I write, and even weirder than what I regularly read lol, I love it too much hahahahahahahaha 😂 |
And I looked for more quotes by my girl and found the following ones particularly fascinating:
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| Trying to find mine in writing, and also without prejudice, apart from a sense of humanity |
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| I relate so much, particularly as regards laughing at my own stupidity. This girl certainly got the same vibe as I |
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| Words of truth |
So yes, Frida Kahlo, this girl looking like a monkey, has become my girl crush. She is because she was super brave, and insisted in working hard even when very sick, overcoming all difficulties, and supported positive revolutionary causes, making an impact. And she loved; she loved super deeply that enormous big baby of hers she couldn't stay away from, even if he cheated on her on an ongoing basis - she was no better in that sense though, hah. Frida Kahlo died in 1954 when she was only 47, so sick that she couldn't even move from the bed. According to the records, she died of a pulmonary embolism, although it is highly speculated that she actually committed suicide.
But we folks that have lived a little, and know a little, and suffered a little, know very well she didn't die neither of pulmonary embolism, nor of suicide.
She died of pain.
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| My girl looking much better in the pic than her painting cause honestly her paintings are a bit oof haha |
Frida Kahlo has become a symbol of feminism, of the LGTBIQA+ community, of art and revolution. But, to me, she is a symbol of someone who was super severely sick, all her life, and yet she had the megalithic balls ('xcuse language) to ignore the constant pain and have an exciting and productive life full of emotion, passion, expression, lovers, and experiences. And anybody who has such ingent mind control over the daily, adverse circumstances lodged even inside her own body - cause the causes of my personal torment are, fortunately, outside of me - gains my immediate and total respect and admiration.
So yeah, that's the kind of girls I crush on, Frida Kahlo. A woman that had Death itself lodged inside her very body and, yet, she managed to Live, and who used her art, her paintings, to vomit that Death, that Pain, out of her, and created something beautiful and inspirational out of it. Even if it was for just a brief moment. Even if it was just right before she grabbed the pencil again, and started a new painting, aiming to ease, again, and somehow, that permanent, permanent pain.
And my girl is an icon for that.
María Concepción Pomar Rosselló
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