it’s a shame we’re not soulmates [pdf literary zine]

Here’s the part they don’t tell you about the people who were wrong for you: they were also, in their chaotic and often infuriating way, formative. Not in the inspirational sense. In the sense that you are currently a person who checks for certain things now because of them. Who asks different questions. Who recognizes a particular type of unavailability from fifty paces and knows exactly which exit to take.

The stories in It’s A Shame We’re Not Soulmates are real. Embarrassingly real. The kind of real where you wince and laugh at the same time because you recognize yourself in them. Which is both the point and slightly damning for everyone involved.

We’re not here to be grateful for the lessons. We’re here to name them. Which is different and also harder and also the only thing that actually matters. This digital zine was written for the girl who kept showing up with everything she had for people who didn’t know what to do with it.

What’s Inside

It’s A Shame We’re Not Soulmates moves through the wreckage from the first love who had no ambition besides his addictions, to the musicians who wrote songs about leaving while never once picking up the phone, to the ones who were genuinely dangerous, and the ones who were just kind of dumb. Each story is separated by the cigarette you were smoking at the time, because some details are just too accurate to cut.

This zine archives the almosts:

♠️ The situationships and the serious ones and the ones that technically never had a label but absolutely had a funeral.

♠️ The people who taught you something real about yourself, usually by doing something that hurt.

♠️ What actually matters — not inspirational advice. Specific, hard-won, occasionally hilarious observations from the other side of the pattern

Why You Keep Ending Up Here

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the rough draft boys: they’re not obviously terrible. They’re interesting. They’re compelling. They give you just enough. Sometimes it’s the right weekend, the right song, the right moment of being truly seen. Then you keep waiting for the rest of it to arrive. It never arrives. That’s not a flaw in your judgment. That’s just a pattern, and you were working with incomplete information.

And the thing nobody tells you about what got filed as normal is that you didn’t write those instructions. You were handed them before you had the language to refuse them. It’s in the moment you learned that wanting things out loud made people leave. The relationship where you built an entire surveillance system to protect your own memory of events, and didn’t stop to ask why that was necessary. None of that was yours. You just kept following a pattern you didn’t consciously choose.

This zine is not going to fix any of that in a hundred pages. But it will make you feel significantly less alone in it, and it will make you laugh at least three times in places where you probably shouldn’t, because we swear we are not bad people. We just have some bad habits.

Why This Zine Is Different

Most things written about bad relationships are either trauma memoirs that leave you gutted on the floor or self-help books that tell you to raise your standards without explaining what that means in practice. It’s A Shame We’re Not Soulmates is neither. It’s a zine of thoughts that suddenly connect: raw, funny, and self-deprecatingly honest.

The voice in here is not a therapist’s voice. It’s not a life coach’s voice. It’s your friend who has made every single one of these mistakes before you and is now sitting across from you going, “Okay. Here’s what I wished I’d clocked sooner”. She’s not going to tell you you’re a queen. She’s going to tell you why she quit answering those spin-the-block texts. She’s going to tell you about the time she googled “What to do if you have a crush on your boyfriend’s friend,” and then explain why that was actually the most useful data point in a three-year relationship where she felt like furniture instead of a person.

See also

Studio Updates

How To Print Your Zine At Home

The cigarettes are just a bonus. But she eventually quit those, too.

Before & After

Before this zine: a list of exes that feels like chaos, a vague sense that you keep ending up in the same place, and the nagging question of whether the problem is you. After this zine: the same list, now readable as a pattern. Two patterns, actually. Both of which have names. Neither of which is your fault. All of which are yours to work on.

Ready to stop drawing the same shape and finally see it for what it is? Download It’s A Shame We’re Not Soulmates and let the pattern become the point.

You didn’t ask for too much. You just kept asking it from the wrong people. We’re fixing that now.

Included in the Problem Solved Collection.