Help needed: FRIDA KAHLO quote under question

by on December 14, 2015

fridaHi readers, I need your help in finding the correct attribution for the Frida Kahlo quote I turned into a comic earlier this year. Shortly after the comic was posted I received an email from reader claiming that the quote was not written by Kahlo, but that she herself had written it and that it had mistakingly become attributed to Kahlo in the chaos of the internet.

The quote in question is:
“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.”

The reader told me that she wrote the quote as a tribute to Kahlo for a submission on the blog PostSecret. The whole point of the blog is for readers to post secret writings anonymously, which is how the problem began (It’s also a fantastic blog worth reading if you haven’t). Being a huge fan of Kahlo, she wrote the quote on a picture of Kahlo and submitted it to the blog in 2008. The only evidence is this repost on a Frida Kahlo fan page. With the internet being the internet, the image got reblogged until eventually people just assumed it was a Frida Kahlo quote.

Various sources (including WikiQuote, which is generally pretty reliable) claim the quote is from Kahlo’s famous diary, but after reading the English translation, I could not find it anywhere. I also got in touch with the Frida Kahlo estate and they couldn’t point to the exact source either. I know Frida wrote in Spanish and translation into English can cause some problems, which only adds to my own uncertainty.

I’m not really sure what to do so I thought I would ask you for help. I know that many of you are way smarter than me, and that there are also many Spanish speaking readers, so if you have any further information, or have any evidence of the quote appearing BEFORE 2008 please leave a comment below. With your help, maybe we can figure this out. So many of you have asked for the poster version to be made available, but I want to get this sorted out first.

I’m a lot more careful when choosing quotes than I used to be, making sure to find the original sources first, but this one slipped through the cracks. My apologies.

– Gav