Advice - Closure is a Myth

By Ananya Gondesi

The title sums up this short article very clearly, and yes; you heard that correctly. You don’t need closure in your life. As time has gone on, and growing up as a teenager, you’ve been told a lot of times that “you must forgive and move on” and while I think that’s a lovely lesson that comes from a good place, it can also have a lot of bad implications on the person, and cause them more harm then it might do good.

First off, giving this solution to every mistake is not good at all. In fact, if someone caused you harm and you feel upset about it, you don’t have to forgive them for it. Many people say that forgiving and forgetting is the best, but I think one of those is obsolete. When you forgive a person, that means that you are now on good terms; you’re not going to fight about that topic anymore because one person or the other apologized and you’ve “moved on”. Say someone lied to you, and if that lie had somehow hurt someone you loved or yourself, you don’t have to accept their apology. You can learn what you need to from that situation and just move on.

It honestly might be a naive take, but the problem with the idea of forgiving and forgetting is that you are not learning from it. If you trusted someone, and they breached that trust, they did something wrong. You forgiving them should not be the own pathway to them changing and realizing they did something wrong in the first place. So, if someone truly wronged you, then you don’t have to forgive them, you can just move on and accept that what they did was wrong.

That being said, if you were the person in the wrong in the situation, the other person forgiving you shouldn’t be a catalyst for change. The fact that you did something to hurt another person or thing should be proof enough that you need to accept responsibility and move on. You need to forgive yourself, regardless of the sides. So closure, when it comes to yourself, makes sense. It makes sense to allow yourself to move on from the event after admitting you did something wrong, and that’s most of the forgiving. The other part is making reparations for yourself.

So, forgive who you’d like to. Forgive yourself always.