A Schizoaffective's Quest to Find Frida Kahlo

My husband Tom and I went to see a play about the legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. I want to discuss how the play affected me as someone with a chronic illness and as someone with a disability.

When Kahlo was 19, she suffered a terrible accident while riding a bus. A handrail pierced through her hip, fracturing her pelvis and spine. She had to stay in a hospital for several weeks, wore a full body cast, and was prescribed several months of bed rest. She started painting to ease the mental and physical pain. (fridakahlo.org) Her most famous works are self-portraits (in fact, the play is called Frida: A Self Portrait) that often depict her feeling broken. “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint,” she said.

I was 19 when I had my first psychotic break with reality, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, later to be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. My break happened while I was a student at The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After the episode I transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) both to be closer to home and because it was a better fit for me artistically and academically. I received a merit scholarship to SAIC. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone to SAIC right out of high school instead of RISD. Would I have had a psychotic break? At any rate, I was a Girl, Interrupted (as author Susanna Kaysen so aptly named her best-selling memoir of madness in 1993). My life changed drastically from what I thought it would be. Frida Kahlo was a girl interrupted, too.

A lot of broken people find solace in Frida Kahlo. Vanessa Severo, the solo actress in the one-woman play she wrote certainly does. “I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you,” Severo said in the play, performed at The Writers Theatre in Glencoe, a suburb north of Chicago. Severo admitted toward the end of the play that she’d recently found out this quote may not actually be Kahlo’s.

She said earlier in the play that the quote compelled her to get on a plane and fly to Mexico City to Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, or La Casa Azul. That’s how she began her quest to find Frida Kahlo. And I think I may have begun my own quest to find Frida Kahlo with Frida: A Self Portrait.