Louise O'Neill on closure: I still don’t have every answer — but now I no longer yearn for them

Why are we so fixated on the idea of closure, as if we are all characters in a true crime documentary? The truth is we don’t always reach a point where a painful experience makes sense and we become grateful it happened, writes Louise O'Neill

Thu, 15 Oct, 2026 - 18:00

Louise O’Neill

In 2023, I went through the kind of breakup that rips through your entire life, tearing it up from the roots. My ex and I had just bought our first home together six months previously, and overnight, the future I assumed we were building together – marriage, children – disappeared. I had to sell the house, move back to Clonakilty to lick my wounds. Over the next few months, as I tried to re-build my life from the ashes, I became fixated on the idea of ‘closure’.

I had countless one-way arguments in my head where I interrogated him until he told me what I needed to know. Why did he do it? When had he stopped loving me? Was any of it real? Were there warning signs? How had I missed them? I replayed conversations, I trawled through social media for clues, I examined timelines and dates, cross-referenced them with my own. I thought if I could just gather all of the information, if I knew every detail, maybe the pain would re-arrange itself into something manageable and I could pack it away, like an old sweater that didn’t fit anymore. Without that, my mind was filling in the blanks and the story it was creating was not a comforting one. “I just want to know what really happened,” I explained to a friend, by which I meant, I need him to tell me something – anything! – which will make this hurt less. And she replied, “you won’t know the truth now and by the time you do know, you won’t care anymore.”

Two of the most difficult emotional states for human beings to tolerate is uncertainty and ambiguity. Many of us would rather receive bad news quickly – at least that way we can make a plan, which gives us some small sense of control – rather than be trapped in an extended period of waiting. It doesn’t matter if it’s a relationship breaking down or a friendship ending, an opportunity not working out as we had imagined or a version of our lives failing to materialise: the agony of unknowing is what will kill us in the end. And so, we look for closure, as if we are characters in a True Crime documentary. Surely, there will be a final piece of evidence? A conversation, an apology, an admission of guilt. Only then can the case be closed for good and we can move on.

In the absence of that, I spent the rest of 2023 trying to heal. I went to a yoga and wellness retreat centre in Thailand where I did hours of life coaching and reiki a day. I doubled my sessions with my therapist. I went to active breathwork sessions, and ecstatic dance classes. I drank plant medicine; I did hypnotherapy and past life regression and a shamanic re-birthing ritual in the woods near Glengarriff. I went to a body jam workshop where we stripped off and painted each other’s naked bodies. I took art classes, making terrible sculptures out of glass beads and driftwood. It was in early January of 2024, when I mentioned that I was considering yet another online self-help programme, that a friend finally put her foot down. I had done enough healing, she said. It was time for me to live.

Louise O'Neill: A broken bone may still ache in winter, even when it’s healed. Picture: Cathal Noonan

And live I did. That was the year when I finally started saying yes – yes to life, yes to joy, yes to desire, yes to love. I went to Dublin, London, Paris, Rome, and New York and I went on a date every night with a different man. In the telling and re-telling of my story to complete strangers, I remembered who I was and how I deserved to be treated; with kindness, respect, care. One date, with an impossible handsome French man, ended with us walking through the streets of Paris for hours. Up the Champs-Elysees, past the Arc de Triomphe, until he kissed me under the Bir-Hakeim bridge. It was only when I returned to my residence that night when I realised the date. It was the exact same day, two years previously, that my ex and I had moved into our new house. All that hope, all our dreams. Gone. I hadn’t tried to distract myself from the memory, it simply didn’t cross my mind. Was that what I needed more after all? Peace. Stillness. The joy of not caring anymore: I wish you well, but more than that, I wish the thoughts of you gone from my life.

I think it’s important to say here that not every terrible thing that happened to you needs to become a learning experience. You don’t have to believe that everything happens for a reason, you don’t have to be ‘grateful’ someone hurt you. It can feel like there’s cultural pressure to create a redemption out of our suffering but sometimes, our pain isn’t a blessing in disguise. It’s just something you’ve survived. A broken bone may still ache in winter, even when it’s healed. You can can think “I wish that hadn’t happened the way it did” and still, you can be happy again, you can love again, you can create a bigger life for yourself. I know this to be true because I have been there, and if I can do it, you can too. I promise.

As for me, I thought healing would mean being able to look to the past and that all the pieces would fall into place. I would understand why it had unfolded the way that it did, and that would be enough. That understanding never came but something else did in its place. There was travel and adventure and fun. Stolen kisses in street corners and candlelit dinners where his hand reached across the table to touch mine and I felt a jolt of desire running through me, hot and fierce. The mornings when I woke up, and remembered all that happened the night before, and my heart beat faster with the whisper of I am alive, I am alive, I am alive. The wound hadn’t disappeared; my life had become so big, it had simply grown around it.

I still don’t have every answer. The difference is now I no longer yearn for them. Perhaps that’s the only closure I ever needed.