I wrote and rewrote this post several times. It was going to be a post about the artist Frida Kahlo. I was going to research her, then write some nice, trite stuff about her, and ‘success’ as an artist. I spent over a few hours researching Frida, then, after carefully crafting a long post, I came back and deleted it. It was too ‘nice.’ It was too ‘pretty.’ Her life was not all glam. It was not this nice little bow tie message about success and happiness. It was filled with pain, sorrow, and triumph.

I came into the writing with a preset message I wanted to send, and I approached studying her through that lens. Then I crafted a whole story about her, with my own agenda as the nice little bow to tie around it.

I don’t want to spend my whole life putting nice little bow’s around horrible, tragic, or painful stories. Life’s not like that. There’s lessons in the beauty for sure, but equally as many lessons in the pain. I don’t want to close myself off to either.