Closure

Closure is a fantasy. A clean ending in a story that was never clean to begin with. A neat little phrase we invented so other people can feel comfortable around our damage. So they can nod politely and say, “Well, at least you got closure,” and not have to sit with the truth—that some wounds don’t heal. They just scab over and split open again every time someone says their name.

They say closure comes from understanding. From confronting the past. From having “the talk.” From writing the letter. From finally hearing why. But I’ve had those conversations. I’ve seen the faces. I’ve asked the questions. And there is no answer that makes it hurt less. No sentence, no confession, no apology that rewinds the damage. Most of the time, the people who hurt you don’t even remember the details. They moved on years ago. And here you are—still holding the pieces. Still bleeding.

I never got closure from my family. Just distance. Just the realization that their love came at her convenience. That their attention was performance-based and fake. That I spent most of my life trying to earn something that should have been mine by default. No apology could fix that. No phone call. No funeral. There’s no closure when the damage is baked into your foundation.

The Navy didn’t offer closure, either. Just discharge papers and a collection of ghosts I still see when I close my eyes too long. People talk about serving with honor. But no one tells you about serving with pain. With fear. With silence. And when it’s over, no one tells you what to do with all that weight. They hand you a certificate and expect you to move on. You smile. You shake hands. And then you go home and fall apart in private.

Closure in marriage? That’s a joke. You sign the papers, or you don’t. You sleep in different rooms. You say less and less until the silence becomes its own language. And people assume if you’re still technically together, that means it’s working. That it’s fixed. That you’ve “healed.” But some things don’t break loudly. They rot. Quietly. Elegantly. Until one day you realize you’re living next to someone who hasn’t touched you in months, and you’re both pretending not to notice.

Closure isn’t real. It’s just branding for emotional surrender. It’s the point where you stop talking about it because you’re tired of sounding broken. You tell people you’re fine so they’ll stop asking. You smile and nod and say, “I’ve made peace with it,” but inside you’re still replaying the moment it all fell apart. Still trying to rewrite the past with different words, a different tone, anything that would make it feel less sharp.

I didn’t want closure. I wanted to go back. I wanted things to be different. I wanted the people who hurt me to look me in the eye and actually feel what they did. But they never do. They justify it. They minimize it. They forget it. And the weight of remembering becomes mine alone.

So no—I don’t believe in closure. I believe in acceptance. In surrender. In living with the scar. In learning how to function even when something inside you is still screaming. I believe in waking up, taking a breath, and carrying the pain like a suitcase you never unpack. That’s not healing. That’s surviving.

And some days, surviving is all I’ve got.

But surviving isn’t some cinematic redemption arc. It’s not clean or brave or noble. It’s ugly. It’s boring. It’s brushing your teeth while holding back tears. It’s staring at your phone wondering why you’re still checking for a message that will never come. It’s getting through a dinner party without snapping when someone says “everything happens for a reason” as if that means anything to someone who’s watched their life implode and had to sweep up the shards alone.

They talk about “letting go” like it’s something you do once. Like you release your grip and the pain floats away into the sky like a balloon. But it doesn’t. It claws its way back in. Late at night. When the room gets quiet. When you’re folding laundry. When a certain smell hits you. When you hear their voice in a stranger’s laugh. Letting go isn’t freedom. It’s maintenance. It’s something you do over and over and over again, until the ghost of what happened fades into something you can almost live with.

And here’s the other truth no one tells you: when the pain finally dulls—when the closure you think you wanted starts to arrive—it doesn’t feel good. It feels like loss. It feels like forgetting what their voice sounded like when they were still kind. It feels like guilt for not missing them the way you used to. Like you’re betraying your younger self, the one who thought this moment, this person, this dream mattered.

Closure is just time wearing grief down to a manageable shape.

You can make peace with something and still resent it. You can forgive and still remember. You can let go and still wake up sweating from a dream where everything was how it should have been. That’s the mess no one wants to admit: healing doesn’t erase the damage. It just teaches you how to move through life with a permanent limp.

Some people say closure is about finding meaning. About growth. About wisdom. But I don’t feel wiser. I don’t feel stronger. I just feel older. Heavier. Like time has calcified around the grief, locking it in place so it can’t destroy me, but also can’t leave. I’ve buried so many versions of myself I don’t even flinch at funerals anymore. Every year is another quiet death. Another person I thought I was. Another illusion I had to burn just to keep going.

I don’t write this for pity. I write this because it’s true. Because maybe someone else out there needs to hear it: you don’t have to be over it to survive it. You don’t need closure to keep moving. You don’t need anyone’s permission to carry your pain. You don’t have to forgive the people who didn’t stay. Or the ones who stayed but made you wish they hadn’t. You’re allowed to be angry. To be quiet. To be unresolved.

You’re allowed to live with it.

We all are.