Last month, one of my clients asked me about closure. I felt it immediately in my body. I have a difficult relationship with that word. It sits somewhere alongside forgiveness for me—often invoked, often demanded, rarely examined. The only real question I ever have when people ask about closure is: why exactly?
Honestly, I wonder if closure is even real—or if, like Paris, it exists but is wildly overrated.
In somatic work, when people come to me with goals—I want to trust again, I want to be open again, I want to stop repeating this pattern— I almost always ask the same thing: If that were possible, what would actually change for you? Often, people pause. So many of our longings stay abstract, attached to lofty ideas that haven’t been made real in the first and only place where they matter: the body. What would happen if you trusted again? Would you feel safer? Would you feel lighter? Would you sleep better? Naming these expectations matters — not because they’re wrong (expectations help us draw internal boundaries), but because they quietly drive the purpose of our effort.
The price of relationship is inconvenience. Relationship is hard because it requires constant negotiation of needs—known and unknown—and because it keeps holding up a mirror we didn’t ask for. It brings us closer, not just to others, but to ourselves. And when that reflection becomes too difficult to face, having a sense of purpose is what helps us keep showing up for the hard moments.
So when this client asked me about closure, I asked them: When you get closure, what becomes possible that isn’t possible now? They paused, then said: “When I have closure, I can move on with my life. I can give myself permission to be free from this story— from what I think it says about me.”
When we wish for closure from a situation, a place, or a relationship, what we’re often really asking for is permission—waiting for something or someone else to give us back the agency we never actually lost. I know this longing well. I write about repair every week, and repair is mostly about finding our way back to our own agency. And if I’m honest, I am desperate for repair. But over time, I’ve learned that repair and closure are not the same thing.
Closure is not repair
Repair asks us to acknowledge the wound, to commit to healing it, and to let go of the coping mechanisms that kept it alive. Healing means allowing the identities built around the wound to die. There is grief in that. Anger. Sadness. Disorientation.
Closure, on the other hand, is much more limited. Closure is the act or state of bringing something to an end in a complete and resolved way, so that no essential parts remain open, pending, or unresolved. The key elements that make it “closure” is not a feeling, it’s a sense of :
Finality – the matter has ended
Completeness – all required steps or components are done
Resolution – outstanding questions, obligations, are settled
And the last point is where closure so often collapses—because there are still questions. So many questions.
Do they still love me? Do they hate me? Are they moving on without me? Will we ever be in right relationship again? Are they okay? What do I do if I see them next Thursday at the lesbian bar?
To understand closure, we might need to become honest about what it is not:
What closure isn’t:
Closure is not emotional peace, it is not satisfaction and it is not agreement or forgiveness.
Closure is not emotional peace.
Emotional peace is not always possible, and it’s never something someone else can give us. Asking others to bring us peace is like asking them to hand us water without asking whether we’re willing to drink it.
Closure is also definitely not satisfaction.
Having worked for years as a Transformative Justice practitioner and somatic practitioner, I know I’ve done my job well when two or more parties leave a repair process feeling partially dissatisfied. When only one person feels completely satisfied, it often means the other has been left unseen.
Repair is difficult because we spend so much time bargaining with reality. It shouldn’t have happened. And we’re right—harm shouldn’t happen. But it did. And it does. And that’s what hurts most: realizing the world we thought we lived in isn’t real. In this world, people betray us and we betray ourselves. People turn away when we need them most and we break promises we swore we’d keep. We feel rejected by people who never wanted to love us, and we abandon those who truly did. We fuck up.
Healing stops being so hurtful when we receive the news of transience with a full heart. We welcome the news of transience as truth, as the end of gaslighting. Everything changes—love certainly, but pain, too. In the meantime, we let the tragic and tender violence of love break us—break us open. The sorrow we’ve been carrying is no longer made obscure by the parts of us that learned to protect us from the reality of this world. We stop abandoning ourselves in our pain. We stay with it. We hold the pain of reality with ourselves, fully.
If you spend your life chasing closure after every heartbreak, I want to say this gently but clearly: those are dead people goals. Only dead people have complete closure. Not because they did something right, but because their life ended. Living means things remain unfinished.
In astrology, Chiron—the wounded healer—teaches this more clearly than anyone else. Chiron is half god, half human. After being deeply wounded, he cannot heal himself, so he spends his life helping others tend to their pain. The most important part of his story is not that he teaches others, but that in order to stop suffering, he asks the gods to let him become fully human — so that he can die. Death is how pain fully integrates. While we are alive, the work is learning how to carry pain without closure and still choose connection. This is embodiment. This is what it means to be alive on this planet—to carry what cannot be resolved and keep reaching for each other anyway.
If you’re in pain and desperate for closure, I need you to read these words twice: your pain doesn’t make you less capable of connection. It makes you alive to it, if you let it.
Healing is not about liking what happened. It is about reckoning with what is. Often, this feels like crawling on all fours, gathering the shattered pieces of something precious, our hearts, our ego, our faith. You can try to reassemble it, but it will never be the same. The cracks will show. The shape may change. You reinvent it—imperfectly—while grieving the intact version you once held.
Accepting that we are never the same after harm—even at the level of DNA—is part of the long work of healing. Repair changes us. It does not restore a pristine “before.” It asks us to let go of the story of our own innocence about the world and most importantly (in conflict with people we’ve loved) about ourselves: healing means facing the ways we are capable of harm. This is why so many people resist repair: it requires truth.
We are not healing because it is satisfying. We are healing because unaddressed harm costs us our capacity for relationship, integrity, and collective life. Because abandoning ourselves when we most need our support and care is the deepest harm of all. We heal because we need us. Because we love us—in every single version we’ve been and will become. That’s what healing is.
Finally, closure is not agreement or forgiveness.
It would be beautiful to hold a peace summit with the people we’ve lost, to sit together until we’ve agreed on what happened and how it happened, until we’ve forgiven ourselves and each other for the harm we caused—and only then separate. As you know, life rarely works that way.
Still, closure can be narrative. A story has closure when not only its central conflict is named and addressed, but its original wound is seen under a different light and with much more compassion. If you were a character in a story—which you are—you might ask yourselves: what is the core wound this relationship has brought to the surface of my skin? Is this pain mine? Is this pain ancestral? What does it reveal about the larger story of my life? And how, and with whom, do I begin to change the lines of that story so it can truly be my own?
This is where your agency lives. Healing offers the rare chance to live life twice: once as we move through it, and again as we look back to make meaning of what has been. What you believed yesterday does not have to be true now. You’re allowed to create the story that heals you and yours.
To end, I want you to know: this piece was written by a broken heart that never found closure. If it has eased even a fraction of your pain, know that it’s only because I choose, every day, to face my own pain with just a little more curiosity than fear.
Stay ungovernable, stay completely unfinished, I need you this way !
Care
Received this in my inbox after pondering for much of the day if I should send my most recent roommate (it didn't work out) a text and ask if they want to stay in contact / have a need for closure. Thank you for the invitation to sit with these questions. Maybe I'm tired of reaching for someone who liked me in my numbest form void of expressed desires. Maybe I can move on without that conversation. Endless gratitude.
Ohhh this hits so hard and resonates so much right now. Thank you for writing this ❤️