A motivational quote attributed to a famous Mexican artist is popular online. We checked to see if Kahlo wrote anything similar.

The full quote goes like this: “I used to think that I was the weirdest person in the world, but then it occurred to me that there are so many people in the world and there’s probably another one just as weird as me.”

A quote signed by Frida Kahlo can be read on entertainment sites (Ivona, WoMo, "Life hacker", "Peekaboo"), on the pages educational institutions, online meetings aphorisms, and also in large quantities in Facebook, Instagram And "VKontakte».

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) left a noticeable mark on painting, and her bright and difficult life still remains a source of inspiration for many. Biographical movie 2002, which won two Oscars, provided a lasting wave of interest in the woman who called icon of feminism. Her quotes are actively disseminated in the West, and in English the statement that interests us about our own strangeness can also be found in the artist’s biography “Forever Frida» by American writer Cathy Caño-Murillo, and many other books published in 2010–2020. There is also a quote on website Denver Art Museum, one of the largest in the western United States, as well as on a popular (but unofficial) website fridakahlo.org.

The only authorized resources associated with the name of the famous Mexican woman are websites Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City and owns the rights to the Frida Kahlo trademark Frida Kahlo Corporation — do not contain traces of the search phrase. And if in the English-speaking segment of the Internet she started diverge in the summer of 2010 (much earlier than the earliest Russian-language examples), then, strangely enough, it was only in autumn 2011. At the same time, we are no longer talking about any authoritative sources; these are just posts by ordinary bloggers.

If in the earliest English-language publication found with the phrase (tweet from 2010) you follow the link to the service posted there Tumblr, then after one more click you can get to the next picture.

In addition to the phrase in question, there is also the following continuation: “I imagine her and imagine that somewhere out there she is also thinking about me. I hope that if you're out there somewhere, you read this and know that yes, it's true, I'm here and I'm just as weird as you." From this part one gets the feeling that the text was written for publication on the Internet. The name of Frida Kahlo is not mentioned under it, but a fragment of her portrait is used in the design. The edges of the image show signs of wear, as if it were a scanned postcard.

There has been an art project in the USA since 2005 PostSecret - a site through which anyone can anonymously share one of their secrets with others by sending a postcard with it to a specific address in California. There are no restrictions on the topic of secrets - they simply must be true and not known to anyone except the author of the postcard. Each postcard is a unique work of art designed by the author, and the social mission of the project is to help cope with psychological pressure: people talk about sexual harassment, their criminal activities, or simply secret desires. As of the first quarter of 2008, the site entered in the top ten most popular among American students.

Just in March 2008, 17-year-old Canadian Rebecca Martin sent on PostSecret a postcard with the reflection quoted above, decorated with a portrait of Frida Kahlo torn from a magazine. On March 16 the postcard was published the first in the next collection on PostSecret and caused a wide response from readers. “Many commenters have written that they feel the same way. It was just very nice, it made me happy,” admitted later Martin.

Seven years later, scrolling through Facebook, a Canadian woman met words that were well known to her, but in the publication they were attributed to Frida Kahlo. Martin wrote to the author of the post that this was in fact a quote from her. Having begun to realize the scale of the error, the girl began to be tormented by the question: “How will I ever correct this situation?” By her own admission, Rebecca needed not so much to tell the world about her authorship, but to convince people that Frida Kahlo did not say this.

Martin then discovered that Australian cartoonist Gavin Aung Than used her words as the basis for one of the issues of her comic Zen Pencils, dedicated to inspirational quotes. The heroine of the comic is a girl very similar to Frida Kahlo, who is trying with all her might to fit into society.

Australian who received an appeal from Martin couldn't independently determine the origin of the statement and, on the advice of readers, turned to the Quote Investigator project, which specializes in the attribution of controversial quotes. Soon it came out investigation project, which confirmed the authorship of Rebecca Martin thanks to a publication preserved in the Internet archive in PostSecret.

However, by that time the quote attributed to Frida Kahlo had already spread too widely for the trend to be stopped by any individual rebuttal publications. A new surge in popularity occurred in 2021, when the phrase, along with one of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits published New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on Twitter.

As a result, the phrase authored by Frida Kahlo, which actually belongs to Rebecca Martin, is actively spreading today. "I think people really like to believe that Frida Kahlo said it because she's such a strong personality." speaks real author.

After Martin’s acquaintances indicated the real author in the comments to the viral post, museum representatives limited themselves to a short message about the incorrect attribution of the quote to the Mexican artist, but did not delete or correct the post itself.