Closure is not a moment between two people. It’s demanding yourself to stop reliving your history and let go of the “what if’s.” It’s embracing that every ounce of pain you experienced was necessary for your growth, peace and joy. It’s a reconciliation with one’s self. – Sarah Jakes Roberts
You didn’t know that about closure, did you? You who has long stayed stuck waiting for a moment that isn’t coming for you. I know that since you clicked on a post about closure, that you’re likely looking for an answer of some sort, hoping that an answer will show up with a sense of finality and that finality will lead you to freedom. Even if you’re not struggling to let go of a person or a relationship, it doesn’t take the loss of a person to need closure. It can be the loss of an opportunity, a dead end to a dream or a door that’s been closed to you without warning.
For the record? I don’t know a damn thing about closure. I can’t tell you how to get it or even what it will look like when it arrives. I can only tell you what it’s not and hope that that will be enough.
Here’s what I know:
Another person cannot give you closure. And I’m sorry for that because I have a feeling if you’re here with me right now, you’re waiting on someone to “give you closure” and it’s not coming. A person can tell you again and again that whatever it is or was that you were doing is over, done, never going to happen—and you still won’t feel any closer to closure. That final conversation you insist on having or that one last text message you insist on sending isn’t going to be the catalyst to closure. Whatever that conversation may or may not hold, you will keep finding cracks in strung-together sentences where closure has slipped through and out of your reach. It’s what we do when we’re not ready to move on or face the uncertainty of a story that has an ending. Another person does not owe you closure. You owe closure to yourself.
There is nothing soon or sudden about closure. A heart headed toward healing will dig its heels into the ground and turn right around when it’s rushed or forced. The path to closure is one heavy, reluctant step forward after another. It’s an unraveling, an unbecoming. It’s getting stripped of everything that no longer serves you and isn’t yours to carry anymore.
Closure is less about understanding and more about acceptance. You don’t have to understand why it happened or how it happened, your only responsibility is accepting that it did and deciding what comes next. Something will come next, by the way. Something always comes next.
You don’t need closure to move on. If you’re holding out for this someday conversation that’s going to bring you a moment of clarity, that conversation does not exist. Undoubtedly, the part of you that’s desperate to keep hope alive will find a reason to stay stuck.
Our perception of closure is that it looks and feels like a door slammed shut, a ring flung across a room, broken dishes and packed suitcases. It could be though, that closure looks less like violence and explosions, and more like a truce between the life you thought was yours and the life that will be yours. Closure is a series of decisions you make that you are not going to spend the rest of your very short life staying stuck in something that happened to you or didn’t happen to you. It’s the gentle friend who comes alongside you and slips their hand into yours and reminds you that it’s possible to be happy again—that it’s okay to be happy again.
This quiet acceptance that other opportunities, other dreams, other people are meant for you does not come quickly. That much I know. And while you may not be able to right size an up-turned world or make sense of something that wasn’t supposed to happen to you, you can remind yourself that you showed up for it. The person, the job, the dream—you showed up and sometimes that’s the only closure that’s yours to keep.
Sometimes, closure arrives years later. Long after you stopped searching for it. You’re just sitting there, laughing this laugh that is un-apologetically yours. As it trails off, the corners of your mouth hug your face and it hits you, ‘I’m happy.’ It’s just like that. With no fanfare or epiphany. Suddenly, you are grateful for goodbyes that carried you to this moment; to the space you are now holding.”