Every day, life hands you a gift. Rarely, it hands you a Very
Big Gift.
Sometimes that Very Big Gift comes in the form of unexpected
closure.
We all want closure, right? Many of my clients are very explicit
in their desire for it. One client described the loose ends in her life as
constituting her very own Circle of Hell, a fiery inferno of What Ifs, I should’ve saids, ‘I wish’es, if
onlys.
It’s human to crave the end of something distressful, and
also to believe that we must see the
end of that something to truly heal and move on. We as a society tend to like
symmetry, and full circles, and clean cuts.
Yet, we live in world that’s inherently asymmetrical, the
circles more like wavy ovals and rarely all the way closed, and the cuts jagged,
hard to stitch up. The world we live in is messy.
And despite our best efforts, we as people are messy.
It is for these reasons that I, more often than not, end up
in a tough love position when my clients tell me that they need this thing to move on in their life. They need that apology. They need that
validation. They need to be heard, or
seen, or noticed. Need, need, need, they
say, and I smile, and nod, and then say, “no, you don’t.”
You see, it’s a matter of want. We want those edges
sewn up. We want to know we’ve said
all we could, or that we were understood, or that there are no hard feelings.
We want to apologize or be apologized to. We want the mess cleaned up, swept
up, stowed away.
But we don’t need
it. And in fact, I think it’s the believing that we need something from someone, in order to move on, that keeps people
sunk into distress, despair, and with bad habits on repeat. When we rely on the
reactions of someone else to determine our healing, we put the key to our contentment
into someone else’s pocket.
Closure in the form of an interaction with another person, a
certain thing you want to say or want said to you, is certainly something you
can crave, yearn for, and seek out. And sometimes, if you’re really, very
lucky, you just might get it. But hear this: You Are Not Entitled to It. If you
get it, consider it a gift. Consider it an ultimate win.
Nine times out of ten, people don’t get closure in the form
of an interaction with another person. They get it from somewhere inside of
them. They learn to think about the situation in a different way. They accept
that there are things that will never get to be said, or heard, or felt. They
accept their lack of power in de-cluttering all of the chaos in the very messy
world, and they find ways to move on with their lives. It can be done.
My life is just as messy as anyone else’s; maybe a little
more so. That being said, I’ve got some broken circles hanging out limbo,
swinging from branches, taunting me with their lack of completion. One of these
broken circles, in particular, was not only broken, but also on fire. It has kept
me up at night. I’ve cried about it, raged about it. It comes up in my dreams
and I wake drenched with cold sweat and cursing my pockmarked and hypersensitive
heart. And because I thought it was the best thing to do, I worked very hard at
making peace this thing, internally. My gut told me that it wasn’t fair to
involve the other person who held the missing link in my incomplete
circle—because my circle was my burden to carry, not theirs.
I made progress. I left the circle hanging up in the
branches, scorched and ashy, but no longer burning. I became able to tolerate
its brokenness. I accepted it as it was.
Then I happened to run into the person who had the power to
complete that tattered circle. And because I am both very lucky and also
because there is goodness in the world, the person gifted me with closure. I
said some stuff I’d wanted to say. I got some questions answered that had
weighed on me. I felt heard and forgiven and valued, and I hope the other
person did, too.
To be clear: I didn’t deserve
this interaction. I didn’t earn it. I wasn’t entitled to it. It just
happened. It was a gift.
I’ve still got a lot of broken circles hanging out in my
branches—unfinished business and unanswered questions and points of grief and
loss. It’s pretty human to have a few. And I know with a certainty that runs
bone deep that many of my circles will never be closed; they’ll always be
missing a piece, or bent beyond recognition, or crafted with a dotted line.
But I’ve gotta tell you: I am grateful, grateful, grateful
to have one less now.
