On Letting (Your Own) Art Revive You

how believing in your work is a revolution

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Frida Kahlo (con globo de cristal), c. 1940. Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Fiber-paper vintage silver gelatin print.

A few weeks ago, I was in the bustle of Mexico City, enjoying the sun and walking the green tree-filled streets of Condesa. It was right after my escape from the U.S. and I needed sustenance—food and a relative amount of solitude to reassess my life.

It felt like I was having a spiritual breakdown; everything known to me was suddenly lost, it felt like it was wrenched from me, and I didn’t have a choice but to do things differently. What’s the difference between a rock and a hard place? I felt like everything I had built around me was collapsing. Yet, I also found myself with a new love, in a city that sustains me, and something was simultaneously transforming inside of me.

I was letting go. In other words, I was moving through a spiritual death.

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In Mexico City (or the world, really) it’s hard to escape Frida Kahlo’s influence, the saturation that is Frida. How she would have hated that she’s become corny #content. I’ve been to several different cities in the last few weeks: Athens, London, Agistri — and in every little pocket (even a random Greek Island with a 1000 inhabitants) I found representations of Kahlo staring back at me. Her face stoic and charged, her eyes searing. Whether embossed into a tote bag, carved into a notebook, or her expression poised and resplendent on a postcard of one of her many self portraits now hanging in my new kitchen, she suddenly became a daily remnant and reminder of how making art is an act of resistance. How despite all odds, you can make something of yourself, of your life.

For her, it wasn’t just about her political beliefs, it was also about her life circumstances. Contracting polio at a young age, which meant one leg was skinnier and shorter than the other, then being impaled by a pole through her pelvis at age eighteen in a train accident—we rarely think of Frida as a disabled artist. I didn’t know that this was the very reason she hid her body with long mestiza style dresses, how she was, for much of her life, embarassed by her injuries. I sympathized with her feelings of disdain toward her physical self, how she felt her body had failed her. She once wrote, “I must have full skirts and long, now that my sick leg is so ugly.”

I developed a pretty world-destroying chronic illness in my mid-teens that left me incapacitated for days at a time every single time I had a flare-up. As I didn’t have language for it at the time, diagnosed at fourteen with an illness nobody understood, my feelings towards myself festered. I just knew I was sick, unlike other teens, and I hated it. Now, as a person coming into their own transness for the last two decades, I also understand myself through the lens of dysphoria, my body was wrong, too feminine, too sensual. My self-hatred, coupled with parental abuse, was activating and punishing. I felt like my body was a personal failing, and I was constantly either in physical or emotional pain.

As I wasn’t allowed outside, due to my mother’s surveillance and control, I didn’t have much of a social life. I lied constantly to appear like a normal teenager. Yet, cloistered at home, I found my imagination expanded in my tiny bedroom. I read books vorcaiously and watched films constantly, my own personal education. These were my main friendships, and became an instrumental in my own liberation. By the time I left Australia, I already knew who I was, and exactly who I wanted to be.

I related to Frida’s isolation, being bedridden after her near-fatal accident, and how that became a locus for change, a way for her to understand herself more profoundly. I recently found this quote from John Berger on Frida, and it felt apt: “The sharing of pain is one of the essential preconditions for a refinding of dignity and hope.”

Understanding her as a disabled person is a complexity we rarely afford her. Yet, for most of her life, she battled with this reality. It’s part of her whole aesthetic, why she chose more traditional dress (as a way to hide her body) and her art making was a process of facing, of coming to terms with, this reality. “I paint myself,” she once wrote, “because I am so often alone.”

Despite her global radiant image I was humbled to learn more about her during this trip, digging deeper into her personal archives. I realized we had more things in common than I had previously known: both double Cancers (she was a Cancer Sun, Rising; me a Cancer moon and Rising), who were both disabled queer Communists with close relationships to our fathers and bad absuive relationships with our mothers. It felt like a strange kind of mirroring.

In the absence of structure, of knowing what else was coming, I found that Frida and her art revived me.

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I am battling an intense bout of imposter syndrome. I recently finished my second novel and showed my new agent and she, very diplomatically, told me it needed a looooot more work. I am desperately in need of money and I was hoping that a book sale could buoy for me a few months/years. I have lost so much money in the last year for reasons I’m still unsure of. I understand that I live beyond my means and that I’m constantly waiting for the next pay check. I feel embarassed that I still, after so many years, don’t have more to show for myself, no savings account. The home I had made for myself in Los Angeles is now no longer accessible to me due to finances, and well, immigration woes… and I’m trying to come to terms with this loss. As a Cancer Moon (who was abused at home), all I’ve ever wanted was a place that was mine. It feels cruel that I could no longer afford it, that others live in it now as I try to understand how to make more money to keep myself sane. Even if I wanted to return, I can’t, I don’t know if I’ll be let back into the US. So I’m in limbo, feeling a sense of bitterness towards my life.

A familiar feeling. I know bitterness well.

I’m in the UK where I don’t want to be, but I am with an unexpected grounding love, a new arrival of a love I’ve never had, and I’m being held in ways I never have been for the first time in my life. I think of how Frida longed for the love of Diego Riviera, her on-off partner, and how his inability to give her the full love she deserved led her to ending her life prematurely. I am of the belief that Frida, openly suicidal and death seeking, wanted to die and called it in. She died at forty-seven, just twelve years older than the age I am now.

Toni Morrison once wrote:

“I only know that I will never again trust my life,

my future, to the whims of men.”

and I wish I could tell Frida that. That her life, her art, was enough to sustain her. That a life can always be remade for oneself. But, then, what do I know of her pain? All I know is that I don’t want to turn on myself anymore. All I know, is I don’t want to fall into the loop of suicidality again. The lack of money does this to me, not knowing when my next pay check comes has led me to cross blades against my skin. I’ve been praying to Allah for the grace of self love, of a sustained kind, one where I won’t deny myself the right to be messy, where I refuse to live in shame. I chose this path, I chose to be different. I chose to speak boldly, didn’t I? Sometimes when I worry about my failings, when I feel embarassed by the invisible loss of all I could have been, comparing myself to all the other writer’s who I’m not, I have to remind myself that I am myself. That this person, this art, is a blessing.

Even if nobody read me, wouldn’t I still have a voice?

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I’ve been reading Saba Keramati’s Self Mythology and nodding, a relief that other people’s words can give me. “My whole life I have been looking to corroborate my own existence,” she writes, as I think of why I write. Why I continue, despite the hardship of this experience, despite the humilation of it.

My dear friend, the poet Jacqueline Suskin, just today wrote about not receiving a grant she was relying on. It’s difficult to see some writers sustained for their work (quite often those who are institutionized) and the rest of us that struggle to find an inkling of support. I’ve applied for six grants this year, I’ve received none of them. In fact, every single grant I’ve ever applied for in my life has been rejected.

On my best of days, I accept that this is my path. That this is, potentially, what God wants for me. Somehow, I keep going, I keep writing, I keep clarifying. I push myself to be better, to articulate with more precision.

Saba writes, in a poem inspired by Frida: “Fractions get fractioned the farther I move from myself.” I remind myself that this is the act of becoming. Perhaps this is my story, to keep writing despite it all.

I’ve been re-reading my dear friend Sarah Aziza’s memoir The Hollow Half, about many things—Gaza and self-annihilation, of suffering from an eating disorder, and how the ghosts of her ancestors churn and haunt. She writes, “There seemed to be such a narrow span of time and type in which women had worth. Lithe, productive, young and desired by a man—some combination of these attributes was required. Women who transgressed or outgrew these traits seemed to be either invisible or ridiculed. Apparently to grow up into woman was, at best, to achieve a brief niche of influence—and then expire.” As I re-read this recently, I thought again of Frida. How she expired because of this desire for love, how not getting it was enough for her to fade.

Thankfully, I am not tethered to a man or men, nor do I feel like any kind of womahood defines me. These days I shirk when people call me one, though I understand I represent that to gendered eyes. Yet, there have been many times in my life where I have felt that fading… where I have myself dissipate, turn into mist.

It takes so much to tell the self: wait, let me stay. What keeps me here is my own resilience, my own desire to remember myself.

Sarah writes, “A decades-long lament of a body deployed in its own betrayal. Saying: there is another life, hidden inside my own.”

Maybe, there’s still a part of me that is hoping for my life to begin, for life to gain me ease. For there to be security that is not fought for; a hunger satiated, tenderness pronounced.

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Today my brilliant new Writing with Vulnerabiluty student, Zeeshan wrote this on his piece Proximity is not Partnership: “Sarah Jaffe, in Work Won’t Love You Back, explains how capitalism thrives on this: turning love into labor, and labor into identity. The creative class is particularly vulnerable. We trade self-worth for access.”

I am reminded that my art is not my worth, but what happens when your art becomes a reflection of yourself? When it is you, entirely. Many writers I know (and I know some of the most successful writers on Earth) are on different stratospheres of success, yet the ones I gravitate to, the ones I keep returning to, are the ones that are poised towards a self-reckoning, a longing for a deeper understanding of self. After knowing many writers for a long time, I’ve also realized that there’s a performativity to this creation. Many writers are only their words, nothing beyond the beauty on a page. Perhaps my struggle is that I’ve always resisted this, the ease of this scenario.

In times of genocide, in worlds collapsing, what do words provide us? Well, I would argue many things — a template for the future, the ability to comprehend the agony of this current time, yet how rarely does that translate into monetary success? I want to believe in a portal, in a time, where I will be held… not just by myself, my words, or the community I’ve built around me… but that my art will sustain me, that it will be enough. I look at Frida, and I am moved by her courage to create despite the agony she found herself in. She still believed in something more for herself, love and revolution. Love is a revolution, but so is life itself.

As Palestinians, Sudanese and Congolese folks continue to be murdered on the daily, as the Global South continues to be plundered by the greed of the Europeans, as Ibrahim Traoré, our Lumumba, our Sankar, resists the psychological terror of the West, I remember that my body is voltage, and so is my life. As I live each day, in memory of those who die in Gaza, of those women raped by the brutality of mercenaries in El Fasher and Kinshasha, as my mother’s body was in Dhaka, as the women in Bangladesh were by men with genocidal hatred, I remember that my body is not warfare, it is light. For resistance is also remembering that we do not have to suffer, that this reality was written by white men and I refuse it with all my might. I am bigger than what my prescribed gender wants me to be. I am beyond territory and borders. I am my own creation.

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Today, another dear comrade, Alice Sparkly Kat wrote:

Did you know that home is your greatest power?

When you lose your home, you lose a substantial chunk of your power.

They also added:

Your home is more than just a house plus some trees. Your home is the way you live. It's your community. It's your proximity and it's your connection to land. Your home is everything that you know. It's your history that you build your life on. That's your whole power. Your home is the entirety of your power.

Your home is every single place where you know how to protest. That's your home. Where is the place that taught you how to protest?

As I’m reading this, I’m reckoning with the fact that losing my home has made me momentarily depressed and insane, perhaps I have even lost some of my power… but that it’s not the end to my story.

I first learned to protest in my body. It was my body that brought me back home, to myself. It was my body, not my mind, that accepted that I’d been sexually abused as a child… and that was the reckoning that changed my life. That made me bolder in myself. If I can articulate that, well… I can articulate anything.

My astrology says, “Trust yourself.” So in this moment, I do. I remember there’s something valuable in my life, in my voice, in my words, in these reflections. So I trust, with all my might, that I am doing what I came here to do.

Our bodies aren’t just sites of betrayal; they are universes with their own power and might. I am beyond just this body but this body, too, has a bravery that I am leaning into, as much as I can. To remember this body is to remember myself, it is to remember all the possibilities of my creation and what I can do.

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