Frida Kahlo

One of the strangest forms of FM pain are what I call the stabbies. These feel like you are being stabbed with a needle, a nail, or a skewer. The sensation of being stabbed is very distinct. It feels real. You have to learn not to jerk each time it happens.

They can come one at a time or in clusters. The strangest I had was the sensation of a trident slamming into my chest, a sensation so powerful that it knocked me off my feet.

In my desperation to find something to do, I began doing a lot of art research for an art project I had been working on covering the history of the censorship of art. This is when I first discovered Frida Kahlo, and a remarkable link to my experience of the stabbies.

Famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo suffered pain her entire adult life after a bus accident when she was 18. The American College of Rheumatology suggests that perhaps Kahlo suffered from fibromyalgia. The condition was unknown in her time, or at least it did not have a name, but descriptions of her struggles with pain certainly suggest that it may have been one of hr many health problems.

She did a lot of self portraits that reflected her own struggles in life. She was much more attractive in photographs than in any of the portraits she painted of herself, which seem to magnify every flaw she apparently saw in her own appearance.

Nothing speaks more to me than her 1944 work, The Broken Column. It depicts her as broken, barely held together. For people with fibromyalgia, what really gets your attention are the nails. Put it all together, and it seems quite possible that this painting depicts a fibromyalgia sufferer. 

 

The Broken Column, Frida Kahlo, 1944

There is also an interesting drawing in her diary. She depicts herself in pain, with 11 arrows that point to parts of her body that are interestingly close to the conventional fibromyalgia tender points.

We'll never know her true diagnosis with certainty, but the fibromyalgia community has adopted her as one of their own. Her fighting spirit despite so many difficulties throughout her life is an inspiration to everyone.