This time last year, I had my heart broken. Crushed. Obliterated. It was an acute pain like none I'd ever experienced before – it honestly felt I was like dying.
For months afterwards, I begged for answers. My ex and I would spend hours on the phone, talking in circles, and we would both leave the conversation feeling the same way: defeated, frustrated. Until the next conversation, and then it would start all over again.
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When my friends asked why I kept doing this, I moaned, "Because I want closure!" I wanted it to be wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. I wanted him to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear to be able to move on. I didn't want our relationship to end with a question mark; I wanted it to end with a full stop.
The truth is that my ex was never going to give me the answers I wanted. I was still hurting, and he was still hurting, and talking about how much we were both hurting didn't do anything but make us both hurt more. By relying on him for my closure, I was taking the power away from myself; I was allowing him to continue to control my happiness, beyond the expiry date of our relationship.
When I stopped giving him that power, the wounds began to heal on their own after I let some time pass, and I no longer felt that my questions needed answering.
I think back on the times I've actually received this mystical closure, and how it made me feel: When I reached out to a high school ex with kindness and he responded with abuse, and I realised I'd seen him retrospectively through rose-coloured glasses all this time. When a boy I loved told me to wait for him, and I did... but when the time came and he was ready, it was all wrong and I closed our chapter without ever wondering "what if?"
In both cases, it hurt to have to wait to find those things out. Without realising it, I had let these little heartbreaks linger – although I outwardly appeared to have moved on, I was still waiting for a final answer, and when I got it, my heart stung all over again.
It's totally understandable that we crave these full-circle resolutions. We want our relationships to have clearly defined beginnings, middles and ends, and we want to make sense of all of it. But life is not a film, and love is difficult. Sometimes we hurt people and we don't know why, and sometimes they hurt us and they don't know why.
It's only through processing these feelings – alone – giving yourself time and taking the lessons you learned with you into future relationships to avoid the same mistakes, that we gain from heartbreak and loss.
This year, I met someone who knocked the wind out of me as soon as we first spoke, and I thought they were everything. The circumstances were hard and strange and we were both scared, but I felt a swelling in my chest like my heart was going to burst, and I knew they felt the same. It wasn't long, though, until all our plans fell apart and they told me over the phone that it wasn't the right time for this, or for anything, and then they stopped emailing me, and I forgot what they looked like and what their hands felt like.
It was all cut off so abruptly but with kindness, and for a while I begged them to tell me why, tell me what they were doing, tell me anything at all – until I realised that we had been lucky to meet, and to share the short time we had; that they had renewed my energy and faith in instantaneous connections and good people, even if those good people are in bad situations or aren't ready for romance yet.
I still think about that person every day, but it's now with a nostalgic fondness rather than a terrible, crushing yearning, and maybe that's what closure really is.
Arbitrary as the concept of a new year is, I'm excited for this one coming up. When the clock strikes midnight, we say goodbye to the pains of 2016 and welcome the uncertain future of 2017. With that, I say goodbye to the romantic trials and tribulations of this year – the ones that ended neatly, the ones that ended up in the air – and I extract the lessons from them, and close the box where they live up in my memories. They are still there, but they don't define or control me.
My best friend once said to me, "Closure is a verb. You have to do it for yourself, because no one else can give it to you."
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