We are taught, quietly and persistently, that closure is something we get. An apology, an explanation, or perhaps a conversation that lands neatly and ties the story up with a bow. However, we will come to realise that real life is rarely that generous.

Sometimes, closure is the thing we never receive, and we will have to learn to live without.

For example, I am a soft person by nature… an empath – sensitive, a believer in grace and second (or twelfth) chances. I am the kind of person who loves deeply, gives freely, and often assumes that if I explain myself well enough, I will be understood. It makes me open. It makes me hopeful, and sometimes, it makes me easy prey.

There are two relationships that come to mind as I write this – one was bound by something close to a soul-tie, and another was bound by blood. In both, I gave love in abundance and expected, well, perhaps unfairly, the same depth of commitment in return. This was not because I believed we had to be identical, but because I assumed love spoke one language. It doesn’t.

Humans are individuals. We arrive with different capacities, different emotional vocabularies, and different thresholds for accountability.

Yet, I tried. I tried to explain. I tried to bridge the gap. I tried again and again, fuelled by a deep need to be understood, and to have my heart translated accurately into theirs.

When those relationships collapsed, they didn’t end cleanly. They hovered in some kind of emotional coma. I attempted resuscitation. Gentle check-ins. Hard conversations. Silence. Space. More effort. Less effort.

Eventually, I understood that I had reached the point where love without reciprocity had begun to cost me too much.

Letting go was not as dramatic as I had feared. It was slow, reluctant, but still quite painful. It was also followed by a long season of justification.

Sleepless nights replaying conversations, imagining alternative outcomes, wondering how many ways I could have prevented the bridge from burning, or in fact, whether I could unburn said bridge if I just tried hard enough. That season lasted years.

What I learnt, slowly and humblingly, is this: we will not always receive the apology we believe we deserve; AND equally uncomfortable — we are rarely entirely blameless. The truth usually lives somewhere in between.

At some point, I had to accept that there would be no two-way apology flowing, no shared agreement on what went wrong, no mutual closure. We would simply be two people standing on opposite sides of the same story, seeing entirely different truths.

Then came another realisation: birds of the same feather flock together, and when someone’s feather is fundamentally different from yours, it does not make them wrong; it simply means that they belong to a different tribe. If they belong to a different tribe, why would you expect them to see, feel, or respond the way you do?

Closure, I have learnt, is not about winning understanding, but about releasing the demand for it. Sometimes closure is agreeing to disagree. Sometimes it is loving someone enough to stop asking them to become who they are not.

Sometimes it is recognising that staying would cost you your peace, and leaving, though harder, is the truer act of self-respect.

Letting go does not always mean forever. Sometimes it means not now. Sometimes it means creating distance until clarity arrives. And sometimes it simply means accepting that this chapter ends without the answers you hoped for.

That is not failure. That is growth.

I no longer measure healing by whether the bridge is repaired. I measure it by whether I can sleep, whether my nervous system has settled, and whether I can hold the memory without bleeding.

Closure does not always arrive wrapped in understanding. Sometimes it arrives as quiet acceptance. As the decision to stop rehearsing old conversations. As the moment you realise that peace is no longer negotiable.

Perhaps the untold truth we don’t say enough is this: not every ending comes with explanation, but every ending can still make room for wholeness.

See you next week.

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