This paper argues that the violence in Iraq has created a double melancholy for women, as shifts in public space reveal the trauma of invasion and local conflict and the shifting attention to control over female bodies. Melancholia is a state of internalized trauma that causes shifts in emotion and a changing sense of self. The inward turning of melancholia also leads to a critical re-appraisal of self, a resistance that the female blogger from Baghdad terms a "virtual" self, and the "stubborn" private voice, the one that "blogs." Published in English to cross cultural lines, the blog is later published as the text Baghdad Burning. This author, code-named River, describes the spaces of "strangeness," both on the street and in her former work location, where she is fired after the war, when they decide to no longer hire women. She describes being "torn to pieces" as she recognizes that her former colleagues now have faces of "hostility." Her vocational identity is challenged twice, first by her colleagues who fire her from her job after the war, and a few of her western blog readers, who accuse her of not being Iraqi because of her fluency in English and computer skills. The losses continue as the Western media creates a reductive gaze, which further constricts ideas of Muslim women, defines suffering in American, not Iraqi terms, and is blinded towards the sufferings of Fallujah. This paper analyzes these doubling affects, multiple attacks on her subjectivity, which leads to a critical and painful shift towards her virtual identity. Describing her virtual identity as therapeutic River diagnoses the twin towers of Iraqi melancholy. She defines loss of female public space, despite the respect she enjoys in her familial space, and particular loss of western media, in contrast to the portraits of Al-Jazeera. The public and private splitting of gendered bodies and media spaces create shifts--new melancholic mirrors of nationalization.