The gift of closure

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.

Half my life

I recently turned 35. I’ve been with my husband, Jeb, for 17.5 years. Do the math: I’ve been with this man half my life.

Yet not even the knowledge that comes with time can stop me from sometimes being plagued with doubt. I often worry whether we’re doing marriage “the right way.” I don’t know about you, but I do this thing where I look at other couples and assume they have it all figured out, everything in their life is perfect and wonderful. I go so far as to let others’ lives play out like movies in my mind. Other couples, watching every TV show together, spending all night talking. Agreeing on every single opinion about every single thing in life, ever. Skipping through dewy meadows in their perfectly pressed clothes and clean shoes, then going home to their pristine houses. (Y’all are killing it, in my imagination.)

I wonder if people do that with me and Jeb. We have an exceptionally well-documented life via social media, due to Jeb being a photographer and also knowing a lot of photographers. A quick perusal of either of our Facebook  accounts reveals lots of pretty pics of us, all made up. Tons of snaps of our kids being awesome. Photos from tropical vacations, and warm, cozy holidays. Our social media screams “We’re happy! SO FREAKING HAPPY!”

And that’s about half of the truth. A lot of the time, we are happy, content, doing fine.  

And a lot of the time, we’ve struggled.

Getting married is easy. You find someone you love. You think, yeah, I could spend my life with this person. You have a celebration and your friends and family all show up and everyone cries. The world is your oyster; everything is possible.

It’s staying married that’s hard.

If you’d have asked me at twenty-three, which is how old I was when I got married, I’d have predicted that over the years, I’d change very little—I knew who I was, what I wanted, the road I was headed down. I had it all figured out.

Except I didn’t and I didn’t have enough foresight to see that I didn’t.

People can change a hell of a lot over time, and I think it’s possible that Jeb and I changed more than most. I pursued many years of higher education, and due to that, was exposed to ideas and people and adversity and growth and culture in a way that molded me, shaped me, carved me into a different person. As for Jeb, he left his job as a public school educator and became a full-time photographer/creative. He learned that he needs to be making things, thinking outside of the box, and not answering to a hierarchy to feel fulfilled through his work.

We also became parents of two kiddos in a span of twenty months, so as we were stretching and learning and developing our singular identities, we were also immersed in the task of keeping tiny humans alive.

The years marched on. I got my PhD and started a private practice. The kids started school. We went to family celebrations. We hung out with friends. We did date nights sometimes. We traveled. We pursued individual hobbies and interests. We built a house and moved to a lovely new neighborhood.

And then one day in our thirties we woke up and realized we had no idea who the other was. I won’t speak for his side of it, but my personal awakening came with the question: Why are we together? We had different groups of friends. We didn’t read the same books, or necessarily gravitate to the same kinds of media, or have any hobbies in common. I loved Jeb, but I didn’t know why I was with him anymore.

At about the same time I was grappling with these serious questions about my marriage, I became depressed— so depressed I couldn’t even see straight. It seemed like every decision I’d ever made in my life was wrong. I questioned my entire existence as a human being: where I’d come from, what I was doing now, where I was going. It was hell. And Jeb got angry and withdrew. He didn’t know what to do with me; didn’t understand what I was trying to say when I talked about my questions, about my doubts, about what wasn’t working for me in our marriage. In hindsight, he was depressed, too, but men sometimes look different when they’re depressed. (Google Masked Male depression for more on that.)

And we fought. Good Lord, did we fight. There were tears and storming out and many nights spent sleeping apart. I spent the night of our 11^th wedding anniversary at my parent’s house, that’s how bad it was.

We contemplated separation. We ate meals together with our kids and had our best “everything is fine” faces on, even as I researched apartments, always late at night, or at the office, while I wept my way through my fifth box of Kleenex.  

But in the chaos, something miraculous happened. We fought for each other. Even through all the squabbling and miscommunicating and passive-aggression, we kept coming back to the same point: we wanted to try. We wanted our family. We wanted to see if we could find each other again.

So we tried. We went to therapy together, and went to therapy individually. First, we bent. I started trying harder to listen to him when he was sharing something he was excited about, even when I was exhausted from listening to people all day, and even if what he was saying didn’t interest me. He started greeting me when I came in the door after work, and went out of his way to tell me all the ways he appreciates me. Essentially, we slowly figured out the ways we had been failing each other and made the others’ emotional needs a priority again. We made a few big shifts, but mostly, we made a million little changes.

And after awhile, we had bent so much that we softened; the rigid edges of us melting. I let him back into the places in my spirit that had long been steeled against him. Though he isn’t and will never again be the man I married, he became a man I wanted to stay married to.

I don’t think that Jeb’s my soulmate. This is because I don’t believe in soulmates, this idea that you can meet someone and POOF, love happens and it’s forever and you don’t have to do anything to make it work. I used to buy into this stuff, and sometimes that wily belief wants to come weaseling back in—mostly when Jeb and I are struggling. I think, during those rough times: “Oh, if only I’d found my soulmate and married him, then I wouldn’t be going through any of this arguing or pain or doubt.” But you know what? I call bullshit. What I really believe in is two people fighting for each other and choosing each other again and again and again, every day. I can’t think of any better definition of love than that.

I didn’t write this for some kind of “atta girl.” I’m not aiming for you all to see me as a paragon of morality, because believe you me, the level of fuck uppery that I’ve reached during these years of growth and struggle has been unreal. I also fully anticipate that I will in some way, at some point, mess something up again.  Our struggle isn't over. It's not a thing that ends. I think marriage/partnership is less like a straight line with some kind of destination that a couple can arrive at, and more like a circle with little pit stops along the path, some happy, some sad, some totally fucked up. And round and round the circle you go, hopefully learning how to navigate the rough times as you know yourself and your partner better.

I also didn’t write this to shame those of you who have divorced or ended long term partnerships. I don’t think every relationship can be saved, or should be.  

I wrote this for the folks like me, who are sitting there comparing their imperfect relationship to everyone else’s “perfect” one, lurking and hiding in secret shame. If your marriage is messy, if there’s some stain on it that you wish wasn’t there but is, if you’ve hurt your partner or been hurt, if you’ve wondered if you made the “right” choice in a partner—you’re not alone. You’re more normal than you think. The more I talk to people who I’m real with, and who are real with me, the more I realize that every long term romantic relationship has problems. It’s what we do with the problem that matters.

As for me, I’m going to keep trying with Jeb for as long as it makes sense to try. Being with him for half of my life hasn’t been nearly long enough.  

Photo: Sarah Gudeman   http://www.sarahgudeman.com