Closure

“Endings are scary and foreign. They split you up emotionally and put you in a place where you don’t know what’s going to happen next.  But with every end of the world, there is a new world that follows.” – Alex Hirsch

Over the past week, I’d been noodling on the idea of the topic for my final 2023 blog post.  By design, I’ve been writing less this year; intentionally dedicating more of my creative efforts toward The Courage Effect.  Come to think of it, it’s not that I haven’t actually been writing less, but am publishing less often.  The bulk of my writing has been spent on “morning pages”,  journaling, and personal reflections over the course of a year that’s presented a mixed bag of the great, the painful, and the unexpected.

The great.  The Courage Effect has been a huge gift since I created it in April, giving me a chance to create space for inspiring conversations with people I admire enormously.  I’ve learned so much from my guests, the processes and support the show needs, and the larger adventure of bringing and keeping a creative endeavor alive. 

The painful.  Honestly, 2023 has been a doozy for me.  As I’ve written in past posts, I’ve been processing a lot of emotions through major life events in my larger family and community, including deaths, cancer diagnoses and treatments, and navigation across a variety of health issues. 

The unexpected. The challenges of this year have also surfaced gifts.  I knew I had amazing people in my life, and this year has repeatedly reaffirmed their strength and resilience.  These are relationships I’m incredibly grateful to have.  It’s also introduced me to new people as part of larger support networks, expanding my community to include humans I might not have otherwise met.  It’s both humbling and beautiful to see people come together to create a web of care.  Despite the pain, there is an abundance of generosity and kindness.

I am very ready to celebrate the holidays and put 2023 in the rear-view mirror, shifting into embracing more positivity, wellbeing, and optimism in 2024.  I realize that what I want is a marker to end it.  I’m seeking closure.

We’ve now arrived at my topic: closure.  It seems unmistakably perfect for year-end reflections – an opportunity for us all to either put something behind us, say goodbye, or consider if we want/can work towards an extension.

Calendars provide us with an unconditional ending; a hard deadline of sorts since we have no control over December transitioning into January.  Similarly, we experience many definitive endings in our lives, such as wrapping up a school year/degree, vacations, projects, jobs, and relationships.  Our various cultures have created ways to recognize them with ceremonies (ex: graduations), celebrations (ex: parties), gatherings (ex: funerals), or practices (ex: new year’s resolutions), and support us to look ahead to what’s next.  These act as our markers, letting us know something is over and we’re moving into a new space.

Even if we know something is ending – and we’re aware that it’s closure we seek – there’s a very real possibility we aren’t prepared for the inevitable if we haven’t given ourselves enough space to process it.  

But what about when the markers don’t exist?  The times we don’t see what’s coming (or aren’t prepared for) such as a cancellation, break-up, ghosting, or death.  In their absence, we likely feel the need to create them.  To create a process of closure.

In their 2020 article Saying Goodbye and Saying It Well: Consequences of a (Not) Well-Rounded Ending (by Bettina Schwörer, Nora Rebekka Krott, and Gabriele Oettingen), the authors’ introduce the concept of a “well-rounded ending”, which they define as happening when “the person feels that he or she has done everything that they could have done, that they have completed something to the fullest, and that all loose ends have been tied up (i.e., a feeling of closure).”  Further, their research concluded that not successfully finding closure tends to be associated with “negative affect and ruminative self-focus,” where we tend to look inward with our negativity bias rearing its head; leading to self-doubt, a lack of self-compassion, and ineffectively processing emotions.

Regardless of how something comes to a close, designing well-rounded endings sounds like a wise, healthy approach.  So what’s keeping us from engaging in the process?  What I see is that in our increasingly busy lives, we deprioritize the process of creating closure.  Endings can be emotional, uncomfortable moments that are easy to pass over, or we simply enter auto-pilot mode; so we’re not investing in something that might help us in the long run.  Throw in a few other factions – immunity to change, avoidance, and pre-nostalgia – and it’s no surprise we rush through endings.

All of this leads me to wonder . . . How might we fashion a better experience around closure?  Here are a few offerings:

Prioritize and acknowledge our need for effective transitions.  Understand that closure is something we’ll need, and shaping well-rounded endings is just as important as an effective kick-off/launch.  Creating time and space for closure increases our odds for more future successes, sparks optimism, supports our mental health as we navigate challenging times.  It’s worth the investment.

Cultivate a reflection practice.  The research tells us that both personal and professional reflection practices have proven benefits.  They allow us to dive deeper into things we tend to either speed through or normalize in order to better understand ourselves and anchor on what matters to us.  Reflection is a habit we can build – where we contemplate if the things we’re doing/saying/thinking align with our longer-term vision of who we want to be and overcome blind spots. 

What does an effective reflection practice look like?  And how do we go about cultivating a habit of reflecting?  Here are some I suggest:

• A structured integrated reflective cycle on a recurring basis, which we can craft to be as simple/complex as you’d like.

• Journaling is a valuable undertaking, even if it’s as short as five minutes a day.  I like to work with a variety of prompts that are switched up on occasion to provide structure and spark thinking for where I am in that day/week/month.

• Meditation or mindfulness practices (I am a big fan of Ten Percent Happier and Calm’s many resources).

Add a good dose of self-compassion. According to research from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, self-criticism is a self-defeating tendency (particularly when we feel like we’re not performing at our best).  On the flip side, self-compassion is actually “the secret to resilience, strength in the face of failure, the ability to learn from mistakes and to bounce back with greater enthusiasm.”

It can be surprising/shocking/horrifying when we listen to what our inner voices tell us every day; especially since we tend to be particularly harder on ourselves than those around us.  We can build emotional resilience by starting to pay more attention to these dialogues and unpack negative undertones.  If you’re beating yourself up or feeling regret, consider integrating some of the practices offered on Dr. Kristen Neff’s Self-Compassion site.  

I invite you to join me in not only celebrating new beginnings, but conclusions.  Set aside the time to look back at 2023 to ponder what was great, the painful, and the unexpected.  What gifts did it render?  What are we ready to leave behind?  In turn, we then shift to develop a clearer vision of what’s next.