Lineage

What struck me most when I learned more about Frida Kahlo wasn’t just her art — it was the way she chose herself.

She famously changed her birth year from 1907 to 1910, aligning it with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. It wasn’t about vanity or youth. It was an act of authorship. A declaration that she would not be explained solely by circumstance, but by meaning. She chose her origin story.

I recognised that instinct immediately.

Not because I wanted to emulate it, but because I had been living it — long before I had language for it. The refusal to let what happened to you become the whole explanation of who you are.

A couple of years ago, my sister gave me two manifestation cards and a pair of charms. One was for a magic love spell — a small teacup, suggesting a careful, intentional brew. The other was to manifest the unapologetic passion and creativity of Frida, marked by a tiny paint palette.

At first, I read them gently. Comfortably. As messages about endurance.
Over time, their meaning shifted. Deepened. Disrupted me.

What I thought were reminders to stay strong revealed themselves as invitations to transformation. Not cope, but become. Not endure, but tell the truth.

That’s how Frida has always shown up for me.

Not as inspiration in the motivational sense — not look how brave she was — but as permission. To tell the truth without softening it. To acknowledge pain without letting it consume the entire narrative. To claim softness and strength at the same time.

That understanding runs through everything I build now.

It’s there in Winning the Fight — a project born from illness, yes, but sustained by defiance, honesty, and refusal to be reduced to a diagnosis. And it’s here, too — in how I write, how I speak, how I choose to be visible.

Frida didn’t make me brave.
She didn’t give me resilience.
She didn’t teach me how to survive pain.

She showed me that pain doesn’t cancel identity.
That softness isn’t weakness.
That self-definition is an act of resistance.

Some women give us courage.
Others give us context.

Frida Kahlo gave me a lineage — a way to understand myself not as an anomaly, but as part of a long tradition of women who chose authorship over erasure.

And once you live from that place — you don’t unlearn it.
You build from it.

She didn’t change who I was. She showed me I could choose myself — deliberately.

This is part 3 of a series on Frida Kahlo — not as an icon, but as lineage.