Brianna Pastor Had to Write About Her Grief and Shame to Begin Healing

Some people may believe that writing about any type of grief, especially your own, is a great first step towards mending. But for me, the practice of writing brings me directly into the thick of grief before I can start noticing a hint of relief. I recognize my grief and feel it most intensely when I am writing about it.

When I began writing my poetry collection, Good Grief, I felt an intense period of sadness, almost as if I was seeing myself from a birds-eye view; devastated for the human who had endured such pain; realizing that person was myself and learning how to combine the two.

While writing, one very specific memory came to mind: I stood at the end of the long hallway in our cramped, make-shift apartment listening to the heaviness of steps and the intensity of keys jangling in the distance. I spent so much time here that I can remember the baseboard radiator and the small piece of cement holding it in place—shaped perfectly into the face of a man that I predict has also spent too much time here, but was willing to watch with me.

This is how I knew what version of my family to expect and how to prepare myself for what may come, and how to know that the outcome was always going to be exactly what I expected, and never what I longed for.

It’s always difficult to wish for things to be a certain way when you haven’t experienced them any different. Growing up surrounded by inconsistency and anger, I was filled with emotions that I didn’t know how to make sense of. I couldn’t name them, I couldn’t express them, so everything I’ve ever felt sat inside me for a long while. Emotions resulted in immediate punishment in my household. There’s only so much sadness that can go around before the walls start caving in because of it.

When I was nine, home became a lot more difficult, as did my ability to bury everything I absorbed. Everyone in my family was dying one by one, too quickly, and my immediate family abruptly became very religious.

As someone who knew they were inherently different (I later came out as queer), this went on to further the trauma I would endure. I began jotting my thoughts down on paper just to put them elsewhere because I thought that if I held it in anymore, I would shatter.

I used to view my journal as if it truly was a sacred friend—someone who wouldn’t see me as weak and helpless, wouldn’t yell back at me, and didn’t have an uninvited, offensive rebuttal. Bringing this new friend with me through teenage angst and a devastating young adulthood, it had always remained the one constant in my life—consistency I had not known to exist in any other area in my life.

In December of 2014, I had my first encounter with being hospitalized for my mental health. It was both the first time I had taken my experience seriously and the catalyst for wanting better for myself. With this, I began sharing my poetry online in hopes that I could make one less person feel alone.

As my account grew over the last decade, I found myself reliving my past but not in the typical way one might think. I was feeling all the emotions and instead of being ashamed, I was open. I was honest, I was empathetic, I was viewing my experience with love and acceptance. For me to write about my grief and trauma, I must first mentally go back to each instance and experience it again. Immerse myself in the situation as someone who witnesses instead of experiences.

And while the devastating effects of grief swarm my body like flies to a carcass, it is the first time I can feel it and recognize that I am alive. After this, after writing through the pain, I felt the lightest I have ever felt.

The act of writing is deeply personal. To me, to you, to all people everywhere. If two people were to have the same experience, their writing would still spill onto the page in a different way.

When I wrote Good Grief, it was a release of every thought I had ever had to keep inside of my body; closed lips and aching heart, self-worth cracked wide open. Having spent my childhood, teenage and young adult years in survival mode, it dawned on me that I never truly got to figure out who I was. I didn’t have the opportunity to find joy and define my identity.

For a long time, this broke me and kept me riddled in depression. Until I began reading all the journals I kept—filled with my innermost fears and poetry front-to-back. Sifting through every page, unbelievable still to me that I was here, alive, to reread them. And that is when it hit me: I have known myself better than I thought all along. Here I was, grieving all the potential versions of myself that I could have met if only my circumstances had been different. Only to realize that I had been growing into exactly who I wanted to be all along, and I couldn’t see it amidst the trauma.

It was important to me for Good Grief to be as close to my personal journal as it could get—messy, loveable, raw. For most of the time I spent hiding from life, I finally understood that in order to be seen I had to allow people to know my journey at every turn.

I had to dismantle the shame that rode on the back of my secrets, break open the grief that shadowed my every thought. Oh, how this terrified me. But I knew that I wanted to write a book, and it didn’t feel right to not start my writing career exposing everything that made me exactly who I am today. It only made sense to use my writing, the very thing that saved my life, to potentially help another person in their time of grief and depression.

The beautiful thing about writing a book is that ten years from now, when my life is completely different, I will be able to look back and have the deepest of empathy for the person I was when I wrote it. I will be able to look at that past version of myself and see her coming out of survival.

Maybe this will ring more true if I told you that when I look back on who I was ten years ago, when I wrote some of these pieces, I feel that way now. I am so proud of that person, then and now—through their grief and repair.

It’s quite a beautiful thing, to be able to reflect on your story, no matter how difficult it had been, and find the courage to keep writing it.

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Good Grief by Brianna Pastor is available via HarperOne.