More Than: About Being Compressed Into a Category

The moment someone learns something about you - a role, a status, a label - a story assembles itself behind their eyes.

They know this one. They've seen it before. And before you've said anything else, the category closes around you. Everything that doesn't fit gets quietly, almost lovingly, compressed out of view.

It doesn't feel like hostility. That's what makes it hard to name. It feels like understanding.

More Than is a zine about that mechanism - the systems, social and structural, that reduce complex people to legible categories. About what it costs to be simplified. About the particular kind of erasure that looks like empathy.

It's written from one specific vantage point: being a multi-hyphenate single mom in a world that picks "mom" and stops listening. But the argument isn't about motherhood. It's about how systems - intake forms, institutions, algorithms, social scripts - prefer summaries to full pictures. And what happens to the parts of you that don't fit the summary.

The tax is real. The cognitive load of holding multiple identities in a world that wants one. The context-switching. The compression you eventually start performing on yourself, because it's easier than watching people's faces rearrange.

And the advice that keeps arriving dressed as care: focus on one thing, scale back, pour from a full cup - as if the problem is personal rather than structural. As if the answer to an impossible situation is reduction.

It isn't.

This zine is for anyone who has been handed a smaller version of themselves and told it was a kindness.

Not a manifesto. Not a self-help guide. A document that thinks out loud — and asks you to think back.

20 pages. A5 format. PDF, print-friendly.

Part essay. Part visual argument. Part prompt.

There is one question at the end. You'll know what to do with it.

From House of Morovka - a small press for documents that ask something of the person holding them.