The Virago Newsletter for December 4th, 2020
By: Michelle Jaqua
Tags: Christmas Tree, Newsletter, The Virago, Women, Christmas

Here’s your chance to catch up on the articles for this week:

How I Deal With Dissociation as an Abuse Survivor “I’ve been hearing the term ‘toxic positivity’ a lot lately, in relation to other people forcing their need for positivity onto others. But personally, that’s something I’ve been doing to myself for as long as I can remember.”

Keeping Up With My Type A Friends Nearly Broke Me “I used to rush around at 100 miles per hour, working extra jobs and studying, all while fitting in a social life that I never honestly enjoyed. But I felt I needed to tick that box too.”

Trying to Break a Bad Habit? Use the Pain-Patience Model “We have a tendency to believe self-improvement is an all-or-nothing pursuit — that everything has to change at once. This is self-defeating and why you must approach it from a detached point-of-view and break it up into sections.”

No, Everything is Not OK “The thing is that life, at the moment, has a lot of bad stuff in it. It just does. We are living through a pandemic. People are dying. On a granular level, we are only one text message away — at any moment of the day — from being kept indoors for 14 days”

Oh To Be Back on the Camino! “That year, fall 2014 to summer 2015, was the worst year of my life professionally and personally. Jack, my late husband, had gone into the ER four times that year; the last time, around Thanksgiving.”

Violence Towards Women (Part 1) “Women are to defer to masculine strength and men will ostensibly protect women who defer. The impact of this belief system is reflected in the ubiquitous threat to women of domestic violence and rape.”

Blaming the Female Victim (Part 2) “The need to assure ourselves that we are invulnerable to danger affords us a false locus of control that, again, shifts the focus onto the victim’s culpability. What deviates from the norm creates conflict with our social reality.

Releasing the Dream of “The Perfect Partner” “Our problems had been building for years — no surprise. Despite all the bad stuff, we did love each other. A lot of genuine good was sandwiched between a whole lotta bad.”

A Lady Down the Street Chopped Up Her Husband “They were the police photographs of a murder that had taken place in our town six years before. The murder happened the day prior to the day my friend and I had been throwing dolls made from dandelions into the river as sacrifices to the river gods.”

I Watch Little House on The Prairie For Self Care “My favorite character on Little House was always Albert. He was the most tragic character on the show, and when bad things happened to him and he had tears in his big brown eyes, I cried right along with him.”

Self Love, Best Love “We spend a lot of time looking for love outside ourselves. We search the highway and the byway, the hills, and the gutters, hoping that this thing called love would one-day peek-a-boo us so that we can grab it, put it into a bag and ride off into the sunset with it.”

An Excerpt From My Post-Natal Journal “I felt in awe of this tiny human, whilst simultaneously in a state of overwhelm. My only way of coping was to just roll with it — Focus on each day as a new entity, despite how much it felt like days-weeks rolled into one.”

How To Live Again After Financial Abuse “When I first tried to leave my ex, I lost all my possessions and took a big financial hit. As a result of this, I was homeless, jobless, and lived in a few t-shirts and shorts on rotation.”

How to Heal from the Mother Wound and Love Yourself “I internalized everything. Every single message she poured out knowingly or unknowingly, I absorbed. It was bad to have outspoken beliefs; it was bad to think or know that you were pretty; it was bad to admit any fault. Perfection was the daily standard.”