Five Ways I Self-Soothe

How I get through the winter without losing my mind in the cold and chaos

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I don’t have to tell you, as readers of this newsletter, that it’s bleak out there at the moment. At any given time, I have at least twenty tabs open on my phone and laptop to stories of misogyny that I’ve found, or been sent, and am considering writing about for this newsletter. Many of them go untouched by me not because they’re any less important than those I do cover but for a whole host of reasons—other writers are all over it, or I don’t have any original analysis to offer, or because the sensationalism of the case risks outstripping its probative value.

And every once in a while I come across a case so darkly revealing that I can’t bear the pain. That’s where I am this week, having been hit hard by a story that made the room spin for a while when it popped up on my newsfeed.

I’m going to try to write about it next week. But in the meantime, I bring you something completely different, that I hope will be useful to at least some of you, as we deal with the dismay and the disorientation of living with the fascist misogyny and transphobia and racism and political violence and and and and and. It’s a list of five ways I soothe myself in November and December. It can also function as something of a gift guide for the overwhelmed intersectional feminist in your life who urgently needs to feel cozy right now, and deserves the modest luxury of self-regulation.

May I make the case for December being the cruelest month, incidentally? The pallid light; the creeping nights; the pressure to frolic of the holidays. Here, though, are some of the ways that I try to steer myself through it gently.