Frida Kahlo and the discipline of looking inward

Some lives are reduced to one simple story when they are told again and again. Kahlo is often remembered in this way: the woman who suffered, transformed that suffering into art and became a symbol of resilience. That version has followed her for decades. We now see her face on tote bags and objects, turned into an icon she might well have challenged.

Standing in the Tate museum, looking at the unapologetic way she painted herself, I wanted to resist that story. I am not an art expert; this is simply what I felt standing in front of her work. What stayed with me was a different Kahlo: a woman who refused to fit into a single narrative. For me, this is where her work begins to raise deeper questions about identity and leadership.

Learning resilience

At eighteen, her life changed when a bus accident left her badly injured. During the months she spent unable to move, her parents placed a mirror above her bed and gave her a lap easel. With the outside world suddenly limited, she turned towards herself. Self-reflection became central to her art. She did not turn inward because she chose to. Circumstances led her there. She built from what was available to her, including her limitations. There is a difference between being naturally resilient and learning resilience because life demands it. The second matters more to me and to many of the people I work with, because it does not ask anyone to begin strong. It asks us to keep becoming.

Living between worlds

Kahlo also lived across several identities. The daughter of a German-Hungarian father and a mother of mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage, she belonged to more than one cultural world. I recognise something of this terrain. It is the space ALTEA was created to name: living between cultures, identities and versions of oneself that do not fit neatly together. Kahlo made those different parts visible. She refused to let others decide which parts of her were acceptable to show.

Leadership as authorship

She held no formal leadership title, yet throughout her life she brought people, ideas, creativity and resistance together. Even towards the end, too ill to stand, she attended her own exhibition, welcoming visitors from her bed. Seen this way, leadership has less to do with position and more to do with how we choose to remain present in the world.

For anyone navigating an identity threshold, leadership may be less about titles and more about authorship: defining yourself rather than living inside definitions created by others. We can admire another person’s strength, but eventually we have to do the work of understanding who we are becoming.

Identity is not discovered once and settled. We shape it again and again through life, and perhaps this is where leadership begins.

Much love,

Charis