Okay, so here’s the thing about being called crazy, unstable, obsessive, too much, not enough, delusional, difficult, and emotionally unavailable all by the same person in the same relationship: at a certain point, you start to wonder if maybe the problem is you.
It isn’t.
But the wondering is real, and it’s exhausting, and it’s specifically designed to be exhausting, and nobody warned you about that part. Nobody handed you anything that said: Here is what’s actually happening to you. Here is why you can’t see it from inside it. Here is why you stayed. Here is what staying costs. Here is the part where you go feral at the finish line, and that’s actually allowed.
Problem Solved is that something. Kind of. It’s also a literary zine collection, a punk manifesto, an annotated record, and, occasionally, a taxonomy of difficult men, offered with love and absolutely zero mercy.
It is three zines. They can be read in any order. They build into something when read together. Here’s what you’re getting:
don’t let the bastards grind you down is the punk one. It’s about self-esteem specifically—not the relationship mechanics, not the narcissistic pattern, but the confidence erosion that happens when someone treats your joy like a personal inconvenience and your opinions like a disruption to the established order. It’s about the culture that softened you up before he arrived and the men who knew exactly which pressure points to push on. It opens in an alleyway before a show and closes with the doors open, the music loud, and something rearranged in you that needed rearranging. There are margin notes. They are not gentle either.
it’s a shame we’re not soulmates is the one about the roster you’ve decided to keep to yourself. The guy you dated because you liked his mohawk and record collection, and realized 3 months in that was all he had going for him, and that you were shallow to even enter a relationship based on that premise. The musicians who predictably all wrote songs about you after the breakup. None of it was flattering. No one is surprised. The psycho you dated that one time. That one dumb guy you dated after the psycho that kinda made you miss the psycho. Stories about all of them are collected into a zine that is 106 pages of literary entertainment that we will probably regret publishing someday.
protect me from all your bullshit is the one about narcissism. Not the word you throw around when your coworker takes credit for your ideas — the actual pattern. The charm offensive that lands at the exact moment you’re soft enough to believe it. The slow erosion you don’t notice until you’re apologizing for an opinion you haven’t finished having yet. It covers the full arc from the wooing phase to the naming to the witch, which is to say, to you, on the other side of it, still here, healing magic intact. 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. Which is exactly why they were pulled into the mess in the first place.
Here is what the collection does as a complete object that none of the individual zines do alone: it shows the whole system. The narcissism pattern, the trauma bond, the self-esteem erosion, and the narrative rewriting are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are the same problem from different angles, operating on the same young woman that hasn’t learned the pattern yet, using the same tools — the ones the culture helpfully pre-installed before any of the men arrived.
Problem Solved is the cold realization that you’ve been demoted from a partner to a problem to be solved. It is the name of this zine collection because something does get solved. Not quickly. Not cleanly. Not in the way you wanted, which was to have never needed these zines in the first place. But by the end of the collection, you will have named every mechanism that was used against you, understood why it worked, and read the account of someone who went all the way through it as you did. And you know what? F*ck those f*ckin’ f*cks. Seriously.
For those currently in a continuous performance review disguised as a relationship where the criteria keep changing, and they never quite pass. And also the ones who got out, not unscathed, but still completely themselves.
This one’s for you.
Problem Solved is now available through Valkyrie Pierce Press.
