What Is Closure…

A week ago, I got an email that rattled my world for a moment. Nothing bad - just a name I didn’t expect to see in my inbox. It landed in the middle of an already heavy few days and asked a question I don’t know if I could ever be ready for, and for about twelve hours I walked around with that familiar pit in my stomach, the kind that makes it hard to focus on anything else.

The conversation itself ended as well as it possibly could. And still, something about it lingered. I realized that something I thought I had closure on and had long since tucked away in my mind… kind of felt like it had never really healed.

I also know my response probably wasn’t what they expected. I imagine it came as a shock, and I’m aware that whatever I said now belongs to them to sit with, process, and make sense of in their own time. That part is out of my hands. And that’s okay - even if it’s uncomfortable. The hardest part now is that they know, and it's part of their story; they can tell whoever they want, and I have no control over that anymore, no matter how much I wanted it to be a quiet memory. 

What made it stranger was the timing. I had already drafted a blog post about a nearby chapter of my life - something adjacent to all of this - and then suddenly real life reached back in and brought some different thinking to it. Because while I’ve had time over the years to accept and be ok with something… the other party has not. It feels weird to deal with the situations 20-year-old me created. 

I think that’s how life often works. Last week held some really good moments, some really hard ones, and some deeply weird ones, all colliding at once in this strange trifecta of chaos. No clean lines. No neat emotional sequencing. Just everything happening together.

Situations like this are hard for me because there isn’t a resolution, or a back-and-forth. There’s no long conversation, no unpacking of the meaning of life, no tidy resolution where everything gets said and understood. Sometimes things are spoken once and then left to echo quietly in the space between two people. And to be clear, this person owes me nothing - this is their time to deal with it however they need to.

And that’s difficult for me, because the unknown is my kryptonite. I like clarity. I like things wrapped up with a neat little bow. I like knowing where something stands so I can place it carefully on a shelf in my mind and move forward. I like closure.

But life doesn’t always offer that kind of closure. Nor should it. 

So much of life is made up of unpredictable moments that quietly push us toward a different fork in the road. I could have chosen the easier path - said less, softened the truth, wrapped the conversation up quickly just to make the discomfort go away. But that kind of relief never lasts. Avoidance might spare you stress in the moment, but it usually collects interest later.

So I chose honesty instead. Even though it was scary. Even though my smartwatch kept alerting me to a rapid heartbeat like it was deeply concerned about my life choices.

One of my favorite quotes is by Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”

What this situation stirred up came from a lifetime ago. With decades of hindsight, I can see clearly that there are things I would do differently now. Choices I’d make with more wisdom, more steadiness, more compassion - especially for others.

But we don’t get to go back.

All we can do is be better than we were yesterday. Respond with the knowledge we have now, even when that knowledge arrives late and reshapes things we thought were already settled.

And it makes me wonder whether true closure is ever about declaring something finished. Maybe when you genuinely did the best you could with what you knew at the time, closure isn’t a sealed ending - it’s an ongoing commitment to growth.

Sometimes things are left open. Sometimes there’s no final conversation, no shared conclusion, no clear sense of how the other person is holding it all. And the discomfort of that openness is something we’re asked to live with. 

I don’t like that lesson. And it’s caused some sleepless nights lately. But I’m learning it anyway.

Maybe the point isn’t to tie every loose end into a perfect bow. Maybe it’s simply to notice when something shifts, acknowledge it honestly, and keep moving forward anyway - choosing the path that aligns with who you are now, even when it leaves unanswered questions behind.

And maybe that, in its own quiet way, is a different kind of closure.