Thursday, July 07, 2005 :::
 

Closure (with a Big C).

Recently an old wound re-opened all by itself. Most times these things need some help… like relentless picking on the edges of the healed over but still visible scar until the whole goddamned thing ruptures into swell of hurt, pain, and remembrance. But this one… this one happened without me even knowing it.

I need to dispel the myth is that there is such a thing as “closure”. It’s bullshit. It doesn’t exist. Things happen or they don’t. People live or they die. The people who make up the props and set decoration of your modern life are here one minute and the next they are gone. No suicide notes of elaborate explanation, no meaningful and mutually beneficial dialogue to close out the chapter, no calm transitions or “sun-setting” to a better way of life, none of that. People just go away and when they do… by all rights and measures, they should stay away. When they die there are no Ouija boards or séances. People stay dead.

In the end Closure is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. I know that sounds cynical and maybe a little bit like I am trying to distill cool from conspiracy, but stay with me. We do so much in the name of Closure. We buy things, we go to therapy, we take prescription medications, we behave in ways that are incongruent with who we are at our cores. And we do it all because at the end of the purchase, or the pill bottle, or the tantrum, we will have brought an episode to the end, resolved or settled unresolved or unsettled feelings from our first pass through a shit storm. Problem is… it doesn’t work.

To my knowledge and experience there is no mechanism that holds the power to undo my hurt. And there are many reasons in life for a person to hurt. But it does me no good to win an argument years after the point of contention has been rendered irrelevant. Apologies for a transgression against me don’t matter when I have already survived the damage. Validation, in any form, after I have moved beyond the moment of needing to be validated is extremely weak medicine. And this is the core of Closure… the idea that there is some combination of dialogue or confrontation that in some way limits, lessens, or nullifies real anguish years beyond the point of injury.

I suppose this might be a learned or at the very least a subtly instilled need, this need for Closure. And so we are not bullshitting each other that is how Closure manifests itself, in a deep-seated need that begs for fulfillment.

Closure is the last ten minutes of a romantic comedy. Closure is in the rhetoric of under-skilled therapists with a high charge out rate. It robs hurt of its true power and meaning because that hurt is analyzed and broken down to its essential and naked parts. And those parts tell the story of some imaginary theft of our identity and happiness and we must, MY GOD WE MUST, reclaim or have reparation made to put things right. I NEED to hear you are sorry for stealing my lunch money when I was 12. I NEED to know you’re sorry for being gay and obliterating the sanctity and meaning of love. I NEED to see you regret leaving me with babies and everything. I NEED to feel like I am whole again!!!

It’s all such a total load of sad and maladjusted bullshit. Hurt is the only currency that buys you any character worth having. Having to endure prejudice grants one the gift of an open mind. Going hungry enriches one’s taste for a fine meal. Sleeping in a subway station in South London makes the down comforter of a 5-star hotel all the softer. Petty insecurity of others draws the blueprint of self-esteem. The sting of stumbling and broken love opens the heart to the real thing. Broken bones mend themselves stronger. Broken Souls are better suited for salvation. Too much happy is boring and, worse, lets the mechanics of human potential atrophy to waste.

So… when the wound opened I was shocked that someone actually used the excuse of Closure. I realized after a few hours of bitch and rage that I have reconciled my hurts and pains and am so much the better person because of that. I don’t grant my detractors or transgressors power over me because I enacted a strategy of survival that put me leagues beyond my original inflictions. Sure, I have hurt. But as a result I have grown. I have prospered. I have succeeded. I have moved beyond the need for apologies or regrets. I have celebrated my pain and exposed Closure as the myth it is.

As it turns out, the wound didn’t open at all. I just heard a fool crying about blood and pain and I reacted. Then I realized I had already lived through that once and once was certainly enough.

::: posted by Mike at 3:59 PM