protect me from all your bullsh!t [pdf literary zine]
Maybe he used other women like props in whatever sad little production he was running. That’s a classic. Or maybe it was the rumors he started. Or the way he called you obsessed, crazy, and manipulative.
He was projecting. He was always projecting.
Print resolution PDF
25 pg
Fine edition
– unavailable
Printed edition
– unavailable
Digital edition
– $8
Print resolution PDF.
Contents
- one. the charm offensive
- two. the grammar of gaslighting
- three. the other woman problem
- four. shadow work
- five. the naming
- six. the witch
- seven. parts to recover
Description
When the naming of the thing is a ‘click’ loud enough that you are pretty sure something broke in the process.
This one’s harder to write about with a smirk. Not because the humor isn’t there. It absolutely is; the whole thing is unhinged in retrospect. But because narcissism does this specific thing where it makes you doubt the story while you’re still inside it.
Protect Me From All Your Bullsh!t is a zine about recognizing a pattern that was designed not to be recognized. It’s about the charm offensive. The slow erosion. The way you started shrinking your reactions to keep the peace. It’s about the moment something clicked. Maybe a meme, maybe a Spotify algorithm serving you exactly the wrong song at exactly the right time. And you went: oh. oh no.
It’s written with teeth. And with grace. Because the people who get caught in this aren’t foolish. They’re usually the ones with the most capacity for love.
This isn’t about forgiving him. Forgiveness is optional, and frankly, not the point. Protect Me From All Your Bullsh!t is more about the shape of narcissistic relationships — not the clinical version, but the lived one. The version where someone makes you feel chosen, and then makes you feel wrong, and then makes the people around you believe you were wrong the whole time. It is written for women who are past the ‘was any of it real’ phase and sitting somewhere inside the ‘what was I supposed to do with that’ phase.
For Women Who Have Since Done the Math
This zine is about the kind of clarity that comes after you stop needing his version of events to be corrected. The kind where you finally know what happened, in your bones, without requiring a witness or anyone else’s agreement.
The zine covers the whole unraveling of relationships that aren’t actually relationships:
♠️ the choosing — what it felt like to be that seen, and why the feeling was the start of the game he is running
♠️ the gaslighting — the slow, creeping kind that doesn’t stay between the two of you
♠️ the reckoning — pattern recognition, the naming, and what you are on the other side of all of it
You Didn’t Miss the Signs. He Hid Them Extremely Well.
You didn’t fall for this because you were naive or unperceptive or not paying enough attention. You fell for it because he showed up at the exact moment you were soft enough to be found, reflected everything good about you back at you, and made the intensity feel like love. That is not a failure of judgment. That is a very specific skill set aimed at a very specific shape of wound.
The gaslighting didn’t stay inside the relationship. It got into the friends, the family, the story everyone around you was telling before you even said a word. He was convincing — the soft voice, the patient eyes, the long-suffering version of himself he handed everyone on his way out. You watched your own story get rewritten in real time. There was nothing you could do about it, because the more you protested, the more you proved his point. This zine is the part where you get to tell it anyway.
The shadow work section will illustrate that understanding why you were susceptible is not the same as being responsible for what was done to you. This zine is for women who are no longer wondering ‘was he a narcissist’ and deep into the ‘why did I keep apologizing for things I didn’t do’ thought loop.
Why This Zine Is Different
Most content in this space either hands you a checklist of red flags or tells you to heal and move forward. Incredibly cute advice. Protect Me From All Your Bullsh!t does neither. It witnesses. First-person, literary, and not particularly interested in making the devastation presentable. The analysis lives in the footnotes. The prose is the point.
The humor is here too, because it has to be. It is funny and devastating in equal measure, which is about where most of us live now. This zine is written for a reader who already knows the terrain. It is not here to explain you to yourself. It is here to say: I was in the same room, at a different time, and it looked exactly like that, and you are not crazy for what you remember. I remember it, too.
Before the Clarity, After the Clarity
Before this zine: you have the experience. Maybe the anger. Possibly the specific insanity of being told you invented something that left bruises. After this zine: you have a witness. A first-person account that says yes, it was real. And yes, it was designed that way by broken men who feel entitled to treat you like an object to prop themselves up, rather than a human being with feelings. And yes, you still are, in the end, a goddess. That part was never up for debate.
Ready to stop carrying his version of events? Download Protect Me From All Your Bullsh!t and find out what it looks like when the story finally belongs to you.
Remember: The bullshit was his. But the clarity is yours.
