Good Grief

Pastor first shared her writings on Instagram a decade ago to address personal issues and seek healing through her compositions. As her popularity grew, she revealed her struggles with depression, anxiety, and harmful habits. This book presents 112 pieces of her poetry and prose, exploring family relations, grief, loneliness, fear, body image, queerness, self-worth, overcoming trauma, and the art of letting go. Pastor writes frankly but emotively: “i loved my sadness because it was honest”; “lonely is where i grow the most.” She frequently tinkers with punctuation conventions, ignores spelling rules, and employs various font styles within a text to accentuate her message. Though there’s deep despair in many of these pieces, Pastor also offers strands of optimism, and a number of her texts focus on healing, love, light, acceptance, self-love, personal transformation, recovery, and survival.