Frida Kahlo’s diary pages do not behave like ordinary prose. Words bleed into watercolor. A sketch of a foot becomes part of a sentence. A list of colors turns into a poem. There is no firm boundary between what she is writing and what she is drawing.
That is the whole point.
For the last ten years of her life, from 1944 to 1954, Kahlo kept a 170-page notebook of ink drawings, watercolors, automatic writing, and self-portraits. She filled it while living with the long-term consequences of a 1925 bus accident in Mexico City, spinal injuries, repeated operations, and worsening health. The diary was published in 1995 by Abrams as The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, with an introduction by Carlos Fuentes and an essay by art historian Sarah M. Lowe. The original is held at the Museo Frida Kahlo (Casa Azul) in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City, in the house where she was born and died.
Kahlo’s pages do not offer a tidy system like the one readers sometimes look for in Leonardo da Vinci’s observation notebooks or the many journals of Bruce Lee. They offer something stranger and more useful: a way of thinking on paper that refuses to choose between words and images.
Here are nine lessons from her notebook, with a small way to try each one in your own.
1. She Used the Page to Think Through Her Reality, Not Escape It
Kahlo gave a remarkably clear description of her own work:
“They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
- Kahlo to Time, 27 April 1953
That line is usually quoted in connection with her canvases, but it applies even more strongly to the diary. The notebook is not a fantasy book. It is where she worked out what was actually happening to her body, her marriage to Diego Rivera, her politics, her cravings, her doctors, her dogs.
Sarah M. Lowe, in her essay accompanying the published diary, points out that Kahlo wrote and drew without much editing. Pages contain crossings-out, splashes, and ink blots incorporated into later marks. The result feels less like a presentation for a reader than a place where thought could keep moving.
I find that a quietly radical idea. Most journaling advice tells you to “be honest” as if honesty were a virtue you turn on. Kahlo’s pages suggest something subtler. Honesty on paper is what happens when you stop trying to make the page look like anything in particular.
Try this: Take one page tonight and write or draw without crossing anything out. If a word goes wrong, leave it. If a shape goes wrong, draw around it. The point is not the page. The point is what you noticed while making it.
2. She Treated Words and Pictures as One Material
The most striking thing about Kahlo’s diary is that there is no real wall between writing and drawing. A page might start with a watercolor wash, get a few lines of Spanish across the top, then a face emerging from the color, then a list of words trailing down the side. The notebook is dense with self-portraits, and Abrams counts some 70 watercolour illustrations across its pages, alongside hundreds of lines of text.
This is a different mode from a writer’s journal, and a different mode from a sketchbook. It is closer to Leonardo da Vinci’s observing journals, where a hand-drawn diagram is part of the argument, not merely an illustration of it.
A small drawing beside a paragraph also gives the page a visual landmark. Even if the drawing is rough, it can make an entry easier to recognize and return to than a page of uninterrupted text.
Try this: Pick one page in your current notebook and add one small image next to your writing – a thumbnail of a room, a face, a plant on your desk. Don’t make it good. Make it specific.
3. She Worked Through Pain by Naming It, Then Drawing Around It
The diary covers the decade in which Kahlo’s health collapsed in stages. Hayden Herrera’s biography Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (HarperPerennial, 1983) is careful about the chronology: spinal surgeries in 1950, a year mostly spent in the hospital, and in August 1953 the amputation of her right leg below the knee.
A few weeks after the amputation, she wrote a line in the diary that has since become one of her most quoted:
“Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar.”
“Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly.”
I want to be careful here. It is tempting to romanticize that sentence. Kahlo was not pretending the amputation was fine. The diary entries around it are full of fear, anger, and dependence on Demerol. But the sentence is also not denial. It is the kind of line a person writes when they have spent ten years using a notebook to name what is happening, and they finally have enough practice to find a phrase that holds both grief and defiance at once.
The lesson is quieter than the meme version. Journals do not fix pain. They give you somewhere to put words around it, so the experience does not have to remain completely unformed.
There is no honest way to turn Kahlo’s experience into a neat exercise. A more modest practice is simply to describe what the body feels without trying to make the sentence poetic: pressure, heat, numbness, fatigue, relief. Specific words can give a difficult day a shape on the page.
4. She Wrote Bilingually, in the Language That Fit the Thought
Kahlo wrote the diary mostly in Spanish, with the occasional English or French phrase, lists of names, and bursts of automatic writing where the language seems to follow the sound rather than the meaning. Lowe notes that Kahlo would sometimes repeat a word for a full line, then break into a sentence, then back into repetition.
I think there’s a quiet permission in this for any journaler who lives in more than one language, or thinks in more than one register. You don’t have to pick. The page can hold a clean Spanish sentence about Diego, then a single English word, then a Nahuatl name, then a doodle. The notebook is not an essay. It does not need to be coherent in the way an essay is coherent.
If you grew up code-switching, your journal might be one of the few places you can let all your languages sit on the same page.
Try this: If you speak more than one language, write tomorrow’s entry in whichever one shows up first for each sentence. Don’t translate yourself.
5. She Used the Diary as a Place for Color, Not Just Words
One of the simplest, most overlooked features of Kahlo’s notebook is that it has color in it. Watercolor, colored inks, washes of red and yellow and blue across whole pages. Some pages have no clear figure at all – just a field of color with a name written into it.
Many journals are pure black ink on white, and there is nothing wrong with that. Kahlo’s pages suggest that writing alone can miss the part of a day that was not really verbal: a color, a texture, a quality of weather.
This is also where I see a deep link to Virginia Woolf’s diary – both of them used the page as a workshop for the eye, not just the mind.
Try this: Keep one colored pencil or marker on your desk for a week. At the end of each day, add one small patch of color to your page before you close it. Note nothing about it. See what it does to your memory of the day a week later.
6. She Drew Herself Repeatedly Without Trying to Look the Same
The self-portrait was Kahlo’s most famous form on canvas. Inside the diary it becomes looser and stranger. There are heads that split into two, faces that grow extra eyes, and bodies fused with deer or trees. Versions of the self recur throughout the notebook.
What’s worth noticing is that she did not try to make these portraits flattering or even consistent. She wasn’t drawing herself to look pretty. She was drawing herself to look like whatever she was that day.
This is not narcissism. It is a form of self-observation. The closest journaling parallel I can find is in Benjamin Franklin’s evening review of his 13 virtues – a daily pass through the question “what was I like today, on this dimension?” Kahlo’s version is visual, but the function is similar. She was using the page to keep meeting herself.
Try this: Once a week, draw a small head-and-shoulders self-portrait on your page. Not a likeness. Just a face that represents how the week felt. Five minutes maximum.
7. She Let the Page Be a Place for Politics, Love, and Doubt All at Once
Kahlo was a committed communist, and the diary makes no attempt to hide it. There are pages with portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao, and angry political slogans – political thinking worked out on the page, much as Du Bois did with his hand-drawn charts. There are also love letters and fragments addressed to Diego Rivera, and to other lovers – women and men. There are jealousies, reconciliations, doubts, prayers.
She did not divide the diary into separate political and personal volumes. Across the same notebook, political figures and slogans sit beside writing about Diego Rivera, love, jealousy, and her own body.
This matters for ordinary journalers too. The temptation to keep a “work journal,” a “feelings journal,” and a “planning journal” is real and sometimes useful. But splitting the notebook can also split a connected thought. Kahlo’s pages remind us that a life rarely separates cleanly into categories, and a notebook that mirrors that overlap can sometimes do more honest work than three tidy ones.
8. She Used Lists, Repetition, and Word-Painting as Drawing in Words
A common feature of Kahlo’s diary, and one less often quoted, is her use of long lists. Lists of colors with their associations. Lists of names. Lists of body parts. Lists where a single word repeats down a column like a chant. Lowe describes these passages as a kind of word-painting, almost automatic writing.
One of the most quoted of these is her list of colors and their meanings, in which she writes lines like:
“Verde: luz tibia y buena. / Solferino: Azteca.”
“Green: warm and good light. / Magenta (Solferino): Aztec.”
What I find useful in this is that the list, on a journal page, doesn’t have to mean what a list usually means. It doesn’t have to be a to-do. It can be a way of slowing down a feeling enough to see it. Five words for one mood. Seven names for one fear. A column of nouns down the left margin, and nothing else.
This is a trick I see in other notebook keepers I admire. Einstein’s notebooks are full of short, dense lines of variables that almost read like lists. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reading lists and outline pages do something similar – they use the column to compress thinking.
Try this: End one journal entry this week with a list of seven words for how the day felt. No sentence around it. Just the column.
9. She Kept Going After Many People Would Have Stopped
The last entries in Kahlo’s diary date from 1954, the year she died at 47. By then she had endured repeated operations and the amputation of her right leg. The last pages still contain drawings, color, and brief passages of writing.
This is the part of Kahlo’s diary that I find hardest to write about without slipping into the very cliches the brief warned against. She was not a “tortured artist” who somehow drew through her suffering. She was a serious painter, a serious thinker, a committed political person, a wife, a lover, a teacher of younger Mexican painters. The diary was one of her tools, not her identity.
The fact remains that she kept returning to the notebook through a decade of serious medical crises. The surviving pages show that the form could contract when her circumstances did: a drawing, a wash of color, or a sentence could still be an entry.
The lesson I take from this is not “draw through your pain.” It is simpler. A journal practice that has any chance of lasting is one that can shrink to fit the day you’re actually having. Two lines on a bad day still counts. A patch of color still counts. One word still counts.
That’s the part I keep coming back to, when I look at people like Bruce Lee filling notebooks while injured or Edison sketching in his hospital bed. The practice survives because it bends.
How to Try a Kahlo-Style Page This Week
You don’t need watercolors. You don’t need a leather sketchbook. You don’t need to be in pain. Here’s the minimal experiment, distilled from her pages:
- Pick a page in whatever notebook you already use. (If you want to see how other people lay theirs out, start with these journal examples.)
- Write one sentence in your strongest language about what is real for you today. If the blank page stalls you, here is what to write in a journal.
- Add one small drawing next to it. Five minutes maximum. Not good – specific.
- Add one patch of color anywhere on the page.
- End with a short list of three to five words for how the day felt.
- Close the notebook. Don’t grade it.
Do this for seven days and you’ll have a small Kahlo-style notebook of your own. Not in talent. In method.
If this kind of slow, primary-source-based writing about journaling is what you want more of, I send essays like this to my newsletter. It’s free, and I open it with the lead magnet “6-Step Guide to Getting Started with Journaling” so you have somewhere to begin.
You can also browse the rest of the hero journals series, where I dig through the actual notebooks of writers, scientists, athletes, and activists to see what they did differently on the page.
Featured image: Frida Kahlo photographed by her father, Guillermo Kahlo, 16 October 1932 – twelve years before she opened the diary. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
