My Friend Frida
“I drank to drown my pain, but the dammed pain learned how to swim . . .”
- Frida Kahlo
Frida understands. She gets it. Polio in childhood, a crippling trolley car accident in her teens in which she suffered a broken spinal column, broken collar bone and eleven fractures in her right leg, and then in her adulthood, a marriage to Diego Rivera. Frida Kahlo was best friends with pain, both physical and emotional. And the quote above describes the cunning nature of pain. In it, Frida speaks of pain like a separate entity, like I do when I talk of “the beast”. It is its own creature, it’s own wily, unscrupulous creature that can outmaneuver its victim with impressive guile.
I’m writing this post because I’m fucking pissed off, frankly. I’m sick of this asshole beast and his crap, pulling a fast one on me left and right. I hate him. I want him to just leave me the hell alone and go away already! Today was yet another day this prick stole from me, like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Grrrr, grrrr! Dammit.
From Frida Kahlo, Surrealist artist and godmother of pain, this is The Broken Column, 1944:
