identity and frida
- Katie and Cailin
- Apr 18, 2018
- 2 min read
What constitutes an identity? Is it our culture? Our ethnicity? Our gender? In high school figuring out who you are is so incredibly confusing. So many things shape you as you grow up: friendships, love, loss, heartbreak. It may seem like teenagers are dramatic about the relationships they make and lose during their adolescence, but we allow these experiences to mold who we are.
On the other hand, it’s easy to fit ourselves into a box of who we should be. We internally force ourselves into stereotypes. We surround ourselves with people we want to be, or at the very least, people we think we should be.
Up until this point we’ve believed everything our parents have told us. If our parents are Republicans, up until now we’ve been Republicans. If our parents are Catholics, we’ve been Catholic. It’s not until we begin to have our own autonomy that we begin to make decisions on who we are going to become. Through our experiences, we allow ourselves to determine our values instead of believing our parents’ predetermined ones. And maybe they’re similar to what our parents believe; maybe they’re worlds apart. And maybe there are people who never find their own autonomy.
The point is, we can’t let anyone tell us who we’re going to be, or more specifically, allow ourselves to be told who we’re going to be. Take Frida Kahlo for example. She was the wife of famous artist Diego Rivera, but she wasn’t going to let that be her claim to fame. Rivera loved her for long, beautiful hair and her colorful dresses. So what did she do? She divorced Rivera and painted a portrait of herself in a gray suit with cropped hair.
We must be Frida. We mustn’t let others define us. We develop our own autonomy so we can decide who we want to be. We’re not predestined to believe something or be something. Although, given, we can’t change our ethnicity or who we’re related to, we can use this as a launching point for figuring out who we’re going to be. We can take control of these, reclaim them, and make a unique and complete identity for ourselves.
-Cailin
(a video on how artists experiment with identity by MoMA!)
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