Let’s start with the version everyone knows.

Escapism is what people do instead of dealing with things. The drinking that starts as a reward and ends as a requirement. The pills that take the edge off until the edge is all that’s left. The sex that fills the void.

That version is real. I’ve seen it.

But I’m making the case for a different kind entirely. The kind where you immerse yourself into something and return with what the pain couldn’t give you — perspective, relief, or even just an hour of actual peace.

It’s the kind of escapism where the pain is still there when you return — it was always going to be there. But you come back with something productive instead of a deeper hole to fill. Many coping mechanisms just make the silence louder. And so you go back. Again. And again.

This is different.

Do you believe in coincidence?

I didn’t used to. Now I’m not sure there’s another word for what keeps happening every time I look at Frida Kahlo’s life and then look at my own.

Frida Kahlo was 18 when a bus collided with a streetcar in Mexico City and her body was changed permanently.

A metal handrail pierced her pelvis.

Her spine fractured.

Her right leg was crushed in ways that would determine the rest of her life.

She had surgeries that never stopped, the pain that never resolved, pregnancies her damaged body couldn’t sustain. In 1953, after decades of fighting to keep it, her right leg was amputated below the knee.

My life, too, was forever changed at age 18.

It was a hit and run accident.

There was a city bus driver who used his tie as a tourniquet to keep me alive while my leg — also my right leg, below the knee — had been ripped from my body and landed more than 50 yards away.

Nine hours of surgery trying to save what was left and keep me alive at the same time.

Ten years of infertility.

Four miscarriages.

Multiple operations and unrelenting pain.

Every year on her birthday, I think — this is the year I talk about these uncanny coincidences. But the parallels are so overwhelming that I shy away every time.

NOT TODAY.

Despite all the similarities, I didn’t choose the same path. I create art designed to distract — illustrated women who mask any insecurities held by their maker (me – if you’re following closely).

So, we are not the same. But when I looked up and found her standing in my story like she’d been there the whole time — I understood exactly why.

Both the sensitive, creative Cancer Sign. Both carried physical scars the world could see and emotional ones it couldn’t. And both married to men who confined us in ways that no painting could ever fully convey.

Frida went the other way.

She painted the thorn necklace drawing blood at her throat and wore it like jewelry. She painted the miscarriages — biologically, unflinchingly, without softening a single detail. She painted the surgeries, the corsets, the body and the spouse – both of which kept failing her.

She dared you to look. And like most artists — it took her death before they did.

There’s a reason history loves artists who create this way. Society has little tolerance for pain or sadness in real life — but inside a painting, inside a song, it gives full permission. Art becomes the place where everyone gets to feel their own pain without having to say it out loud. The tortured artist carries it for all of us.

Those of us who make happy things don’t get that kind of reverence. Lighthearted art gets dismissed. Color and whimsy and women who look like everything is fine — not serious enough. Not real enough. As if choosing beauty over pain is somehow less honest than putting the scars directly on the canvas.

It isn’t. It’s just harder to explain.

She finally used her prosthesis to attend her very last exhibition. Her final diary entry hoped the exit would be joyful. Frida was only 47.

She placed her pain onto the canvas for the world to see.

That is definitely one way to do it.

I have lived almost a decade past the age she reached.

I want to be precise about what that decade has looked like, because I think it matters for the argument I’m making. A re-amputation. A divorce that tried its best to break me. Starting my business over from the ground up. Raising twins alone. A new relationship navigated through menopause and chronic pain that has never fully subsided since I was 18 years old.

Still creating – even when AI makes me feel defeated.

Nobody sees most of it. What they see — is that I seem like the happiest person around.

But my smile comes at a cost. Choosing every single day to make something joyful when you are not — that is not the absence of struggle.

My partner thinks I’m a workaholic. He’s not wrong. There is a price to pay even in the healthiest version of this. I am not saying that creative escapism is free or easy or without consequence.

I’m saying it gives something back.

The other kind doesn’t.

So I painted Frida. My version, which means she’s colorful and alive and unmistakably Sugarluxe. I gave her my palette — the pinks, the teals, the flowers. The lashes.

I kept the monkey and the cat from the original. I adopted a cat on my 21st birthday. His name was Monkey. Just so you know.

But I did change something important: the hummingbird in her self-portrait hangs from a thorn necklace like the irony that it is. I replaced it with a sacred heart.

Both symbolize suffering.

She painted herself in pain, over and over, for a world that wouldn’t fully recognize her until after she was gone. I painted her in the palette of a woman who found a different way to get through it.

Now that I think about it, this feels less like a Frida Kahlo tribute and more like a resurrection.

Happy birthday, Frida. You showed the world your pain which inspired me to find another way to carry mine.