Closures

On unanswered questions, emotional loose ends, and choosing yourself anyway

There is something deeply unsettling about a story that doesn’t agree to end.

And i’ve noticed this about us too, we grow restless when a story keeps breathing after we’ve decided it should be over. We don’t fear endings. We fear the ones that refuse to arrive.

We crave neat conclusions, stamped approvals, emotional receipts. We want conversations to land, wounds to explain themselves, people to say the exact sentence that will finally let us sleep. Closure, we’re told, is healthy, necessary and mature.

I’ve never fully believed that.

Because what we call “closure” is often just control dressed as healing. A desperate attempt to freeze-frame a moment so it stops moving inside us. We say we want peace, but what we really want is silence, the kind that shuts the mind up, even if it lies to do so.

But why do we panic when a story doesn’t finish properly? Or Why does ambiguity itch more than betrayal?

Maybe because an open ending reminds us of something unbearable: that not everything is meant to be understood. That some experiences don’t arrive with explanations, only echoes. And the mind- well, the mind hates echoes. It keeps replaying them, louder each time, until we start calling it obsession or madness.

We chase closure the way people chase exits in a burning building.

Desperate. Urgent. Blinded.

Certain that once we’re out, we’ll be safe. But no one tells you this part: sometimes the fire follows you. Sometimes the unanswered question becomes part of your architecture.

What fascinates me is how closure-seeking changes people. Watch how gentle humans turn sharp. How calm voices become interrogations. How “I just need clarity” morphs into obsession. We knock on emotional doors long after they’ve been sealed, convinced that one more answer will fix the noise.

But what if the noise isn’t the enemy?

What if thinking: looping, spiralling, revisiting, isn’t a flaw but a form of processing? What if the mind isn’t broken for refusing to stop, but honest for refusing to pretend?

Maybe I don’t understand the urgency to stop thoughts. Thoughts are just how we metabolise loss. How we grieve futures that never happened. How we sit with versions of ourselves that didn’t survive the situation.

Some stories don’t want closure. They just want space.

Maybe the unease isn’t something to fix. Maybe it is the truest proof that we are still alive. Still unraveling. Still unfinished.

Some of us will never stop chasing answers. Some of us will never find them. And maybe the most radical thing we can do is let certain chapters remain unresolved. To stop demanding clean endings from messy humans. To accept that peace doesn’t always come from answers but sometimes it comes from learning how to live with the question.

Still breathing and still yours.

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PS: And perhaps we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives.

This is part of Unreliable Narrators - a series on the stories we tell to stay functional.

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