“Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true. I have lost identities, beliefs, and relationships it has hurt to lose. I have learned that when I live from my emotions, knowing, and imagination, I am always losing. What I lose is always what is no longer true enough so that I can take full hold of what is.”

Glennon Doyle Melton, Untamed

Growing older has required more goodbyes than I expected.

Some have been obvious. Others have been painfully reluctant. Friendships, relationships, even family—people I once assumed would occupy permanent roles in my life who, for one reason or another, no longer do.

I used to think history carried more weight than it does.

That enough years, enough memories, enough love could compensate for the ways a relationship had changed.

Sometimes they can.

Sometimes they can’t.

Eventually, the difference between the relationships that replenish you and the ones that steadily deplete you becomes difficult to ignore.

The people whose love doesn’t require constant negotiation become easier to recognize too. The ones who show up. Who make room for you. Who don’t make affection feel contingent upon your willingness to accept whatever version of it they’re prepared to offer.

I spent a lot of this past year learning the difference.

And somewhere in the process, I realized something embarrassingly simple:

We will never have control over other people’s bullshit.

But we do have some say in how long we participate in it.

For me, that distinction changed something.

There are things we cannot control. People leave. People disappoint us. Relationships change without our permission. Someone can hurt you without ever offering an explanation sufficient enough to make the hurt make sense.

But eventually, what happens next becomes ours.

I used to think closure was something another person could give me.

The right conversation.

The missing explanation.

An apology delivered with exactly enough remorse to make everything that preceded it easier to understand.

I’m less convinced of that now.

There are questions another person may never answer satisfactorily. There are apologies that will never arrive. And there are endings that become more painful the longer we insist upon extracting something from them that they simply cannot give us.

Maybe closure is less about finally understanding what happened and more about accepting that you may never understand it completely.

There is freedom in that.

Not immediate freedom. Not the kind where you wake up one morning suddenly indifferent to something that once mattered enormously.

The slower kind.

The kind built every time you resist reopening something you’ve already decided needs to close.

Because a wound won’t heal if you keep touching it.

I don’t think this means building permanent fences around our hearts. I don’t particularly want to become someone whose response to being hurt is to become harder to reach.

But access to us should mean something.

A history of love is not, by itself, a compelling reason to remain close to someone who repeatedly disappoints you. Neither is nostalgia. Neither is the person they once were, nor the person you keep hoping they might become again.

That may be one of the harder things about saying goodbye.

Sometimes you’re not only letting go of a person.

You’re letting go of the version of the relationship you kept believing was still possible.

And there is grief in that.

Real grief.

But there can also be relief.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I think I spent a long time believing that walking away meant I had failed at loving someone. That perhaps greater patience, greater understanding or another chance would finally produce a different ending.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes another chance is simply another chance for the same thing to happen.

So I’m learning to let some goodbyes remain goodbyes.

Not because the people on the other side of them were necessarily terrible. Not because none of it mattered. And certainly not because leaving makes the loss painless.

Because sometimes something can have mattered deeply and still no longer belong in your life.

That doesn’t erase what was good.

It just makes room for what comes next.

“The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough. Rebirth means death. Once a truer, more beautiful vision is born inside us, life is in the direction of that vision. Holding on to what is no longer true enough is not safe; it’s the riskiest move because it is the certain death of everything that was meant to be. We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated.“

Glennon Doyle Melton, Untamed