Healing Doesn’t Mean Forgetting: When Closure Isn’t Peace

We’re always taught to believe that healing should look like the erasure of your memory.

The fact that later on, as we move on, the recollections will grow hazy, the names no longer will resound in our minds, and the past will happily fold itself into a remote and innocuous object. We are taught that peace is closure, that when we can figure out what made something go, then we will be free.

But what if that isn’t true?

Healing has nothing to do with forgetting?

Healing does not wear out with time, some experiences. Others create impressions so strong that we would have to forget them, and this would be to forget some of ourselves, some aspect of us that thought, or loved, or suffered, or progressed in their presence. And perhaps there was no aim to forget. And sometimes it was just to know how to exist with the recalling.

The closure is romanticised. We are picturing a last word, the last meeting, and a door being closed with a sensible and clean ending. However, to most of us, closure is not always delivered in perfect clarity. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s silent. The door is sometimes banged down and locked without the slightest notice and sometimes just left open with no explanation whatsoever.

And Yet—Life Keeps Moving

Healing is something more mute and much more complex. It is not about getting up in the morning and not feeling. It is about waking up and finding out that the memory is still painful; however, the memory does not control you anymore. It is knowing that you can hear their name, and you can do this without your chest sinking in, even though there may still be that damp pain under the skin. It is known that peace does not necessarily bring relief. Certainly, sometimes it's just like coexistence.

We do not speak enough of what sort of healing takes place without resolution.

• The type that you never receive an apology from.

• The type in which the truth remains concealed.

• The kind of ending that does not make sense, however many times you revisit it in your mind.

There Are No Answers to Healing

In such times, there are limitations. It is about refusing to reopen wounds simply because you miss what used to be familiar to you. It is about letting yourself mourn, not necessarily requiring that the mourning justify itself or rushing up and getting over it.

Forgetting would be easier. Forgetting would be cleaner. But to forget would be unscrupulous as well.

It is due to the fact that such experiences were important. The love mattered. The pain mattered. The nights you had lived through, and you felt that you would never matter. It was the version of you who survived it all.

Healing Means Stop Hurting Yourself With Memory; Instead, Embrace It

There is a quiet power in the recognition of the fact that something can still hurt and no longer make you. That you need not carry memories and have them define your value. That you can miss somebody that much and still realise that they are not supposed to be walking beside you anymore.

Here, most people are lost because they think that since something continues to hurt, it is not supposed to be cured. Recovery is not the lack of suffering. It is the capacity to be able to sit with it, not to allow it to engulf you. It is the understanding that growth is not necessarily a feel-good experience and that growth can sometimes be experienced like loss.

• It is not always peace but acceptance of closure.

• Tolerance does not always lead to comprehension.

• Coming to terms with the fact that not all stories work out; they just cease.

You don’t have to accept that you can honour what was without having to reopen what broke you.

Acceptance Does Not Mean Approval

That does not imply that you are fine with what has occurred. It is an indication that you no longer struggle with reality as it stands. It is like you have selected yourself even when the answers were never forthcoming.

• And perhaps that is what healing really looks like.

• Not that there is nothing painful, but that there is self-compassion.

• And not forgetting, but forgiving yourself, still, feel.

• It is not closure but the heart to continue despite that.

Then you see that, when you are healing and you are still remembering – when there are still some songs that hurt, when there are still some places that hurt, when there are still some memories that seem to last you longer than you think they are supposed to – then you see you are not doing it wrong.

You are human, and closure doesn’t bring peace.

Healing is messy. It’s nonlinear. That which is not complete is more likely to be unfinished than completed. And it was never intended to take away what you were. It was supposed to assist you in becoming what you are now.

It does not mean that you are trapped by having to remember. It means you lived. And at times that is the boldest thing.

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