Thank You: A Firsthand Account of Closure

The letter I couldn’t write until now

I’ve always found it easier to burn bridges and scorch the earth behind me. For a long time, I didn’t understand the impulse. It felt like survival — the only option available to me when my defenses were shattered.

It was only after an encounter with my shadow self that I could see the truth hidden beneath layers of old wounds and past trauma. It took a long time to understand that I didn’t burn bridges to sever those connections. I burned them to protect myself from nearly unfathomable pain. Every offensive maneuver covered a defensive one — a last ditch effort to guard an already-broken heart.

Of course, this never works. The heart is, after all, already broken. While some bridges are meant to be burned, some we only burn when we don’t know another way forward and only know for sure that we won’t survive going back. We say Enough and then do our best to move forward. We hold onto Dylan McKay’s words — Let the bridges I burn light the way.

And they do — for a time. We have the space and time to reflect, to allow room for healing, and the fire casts long shadows that we ultimately realize are our own. If we’re lucky, we dive into shadow work and discover things about ourselves that we could not see before. Healing occurs, and maybe we one day wish that we could have gotten there without scorching the earth behind us, but by then, we’ve learned a bit about self-compassion — enough to forgive ourselves for not knowing any better.

In the aftermath, we learn ways of mending bridges rather than burning them. We figure out how to build safe boundaries without erecting walls. We realize growth doesn’t always have to come from total destruction. Sometimes, it can come from reassessing our relationships and changing the environments we grow them. We look for closure — not in other people but in the only place we’ll ever find it. In ourselves.

Closure didn’t come when I was looking for it. It certainly didn’t come when I would have given anything to have it. It came in the quiet — in my exhaustion on a night I was recovering from an illness. I laid my head down to sleep, and I felt a curious sense of peace. The love I felt no longer felt heavy, a burden I was forced to carry. It settled around me, and I felt comforted.

There was no lingering sense of bitterness, no last dash of anger. There wasn’t a feeling of overwhelming heartache but only a slight dusting of wistful sadness. I didn’t dismiss or discount the terrible things that happened — the days when neither of us showed up as our best selves. I just accepted them as part of the whole — broken pieces that formed a once-beautiful mosaic lit by a light from within. More than anything else, I felt grateful.

It takes so long for those walls to come down, for my defenses to soften. It takes months of private grief and wild anger, months of complete denial alternating with terrible acceptance. Then, the shift happens. I hold hands with my shadow self and let her walk me toward the light. I find closure there. It goes a little something like this.

Thank you.

Thank you for making me laugh on my hardest days when no one else ever could.

Thank you for everything you taught me — about relationships, about life, and especially about myself.

Thank you for deep dives and not just shallow conversations.

Thank you for sharing all the pieces of yourself that you, perhaps, never shared with anyone else. Thank you for allowing me to share pieces of myself, pieces I never shared with anyone either.

Thank you for being willing to fight with me, as I’ve learned that it’s better to argue than to let resentment build in silence.

Thank you for trying, even when it didn’t work out.

Thank you for sharing your life with me for the time that we had.

Thank you for showing me my triggers and shadows so that I could turn toward them for healing.

Thank you for being a lifeline when a chronic illness stole my hope in cycles I didn’t yet understand.

Thank you for making my life immeasurably better simply by being you.

Thank you for the memories I can cherish without any bitterness attached.

Thank you for helping elevate me to the person I am today.

Thank you for being my person for a little while.

Thank you for letting me go when you realized that I wasn’t your person after all.

Thank you for everything.