What If Waiting for Closure Is the Thing Keeping You Stuck?

There's a particular kind of stuck that nobody warns you about. Not the paralysis that comes from not knowing what to do. The paralysis that comes from waiting to feel ready.

You're waiting for the anger to pass. Waiting to stop missing them. Waiting for the version of yourself that existed before the divorce, the diagnosis, the job that hollowed you out, to come back and tell you it's okay to start again.

Moving forward after loss doesn't work that way. And understanding why might be the most useful thing you read this week.

Why We Think Closure Is a Prerequisite

The idea of closure is deeply embedded in how we talk about grief and endings. We treat it like a door that clicks shut, cleanly, before you're allowed to move to the next room. Therapists offer it. Well-meaning friends promise you'll find it. Self-help culture sells it.

But closure, as most people imagine it, rarely arrives on schedule. And waiting for it can quietly become its own kind of avoidance.

Psychologist George Bonanno, who has spent decades studying grief and resilience at Columbia University, found that the majority of people who experience significant loss don't follow the tidy five-stage model popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Instead, most people oscillate. They have good days and bad days, sometimes in the same hour. They laugh at something on a Wednesday and fall apart on a Saturday. They move forward and backward at the same time.

That's not a sign that something has gone wrong. It's what moving forward after loss actually looks like from the inside.

What "Moving Forward" Actually Means

Here's where most advice goes wrong. Moving forward gets framed as leaving something behind. As if grief, or the person, or the life you had, is a coat you can finally stop wearing.

It isn't. You carry it with you. The question is just whether you're moving while you carry it, or standing still, waiting until the weight disappears.

Continuing bonds theory, developed by researchers Klass, Silverman, and Nickman in their 1996 work on grief, challenged the dominant model that healthy grieving required emotional detachment from whoever or whatever was lost. Their research found that maintaining an ongoing internal relationship with what was lost, while still engaging with present life, was not just normal but healthy.

You don't have to stop loving someone to start living. You don't have to be over the divorce to start building something new. You don't have to have figured out your identity to take one step in a direction that feels even slightly right.

The Trap of "I'll Start When I Feel Better"

This is the sentence that costs people years.

It sounds reasonable. It sounds self-aware. But what it actually means, most of the time, is: I'm waiting for a feeling that may not come before the action, because the action is what produces the feeling.

Grief researcher and author David Kessler, who worked alongside Kübler-Ross and later wrote Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, argues that meaning doesn't precede forward motion. It emerges from it. You don't figure out who you are after the loss and then start living as that person. You live, imperfectly and uncertainly, and the meaning of what happened gradually becomes clearer.

This is genuinely uncomfortable news. It means there's no stage you need to reach first. No clarity you need to unlock. No readiness that will descend on you one morning like weather.

The starting is the thing.

What Moving Forward Without Closure Looks Like in Practice

It looks like sending the application when you still don't know what you want your career to be.

It looks like having dinner with a friend when you're not sure you're ready to be social yet.

It looks like making one small decision every day, not because you have direction, but because making decisions is how you find it.

It looks like putting one foot in front of the other on a day when both feet feel like they belong to someone else.

This is not toxic positivity. It's the opposite. It's acknowledging the full weight of what you're carrying and choosing to move anyway, not because you feel ready, but because waiting for ready has its own cost.

Some people find a small, concrete anchor helps on the days when forward motion feels completely abstract. A word on your wrist, something visible and physical, can serve as a reminder that you're already doing the thing you thought you couldn't do. The Still I Rise tattoo from MotivInk is designed for exactly that kind of day. Not as a declaration that everything is fine, but as a quiet acknowledgment that you're still here, still moving, even when it's hard.

On the days when the words on your wrist feel like a lie rather than a truth, that's worth reading about too. When your strength tattoo feels like a lie unpacks exactly that moment.

How to Keep Going When You Have No Map

Start smaller than makes sense

When you don't know where you're going, the instinct is to think bigger. Plan more. Get clarity. But clarity comes from action, not the other way around. Pick the smallest possible version of a step and do that one.

Not "figure out my next career." Call one person you used to work with, just to talk.

Not "process the grief." Write two sentences about how today felt, then close the notebook.

Not "rebuild my confidence." Show up to one thing this week that slightly scares you.

Let the feeling follow the action

You will not feel ready before you start. That's not a bug in the process. That's how it works for almost everyone. The feeling of readiness, of tentative okay-ness, tends to come after the first few steps, not before them.

Act first. Feel better second. Not always. But more often than waiting allows.

Stop measuring progress by how you feel

Grief and identity transitions are nonlinear. Measuring your progress by your emotional state on any given day is like measuring a long walk by how your feet feel at the three-mile mark. You're going to have bad miles. They don't mean you've gone backward.

Measure instead by whether you showed up. Whether you made the call. Whether you sent the email. Whether you got out of bed and put one thing in front of another.

There's also a real difference between quitting and running completely empty. If you're not sure which one you're doing, this post untangles the two: the difference between giving up and running empty.

That is forward motion. Even when it doesn't feel like it.

The One Thing to Do Today

Pick something you've been postponing because you're waiting to feel ready, and do ten percent of it today. Not the whole thing. Ten percent.

Write the opening paragraph, not the whole application. Walk around the block, not the full workout. Text one person, not the group chat.

You are not waiting for closure. You are already moving forward after loss. You just might not have recognized it yet.

The days when keeping going feels impossible are the days when a visible reminder matters most. These are the MotivInk tattoos people reach for in those moments: Still I Rise, Keep Going, and I Can & I Will. Worn on a wrist, a forearm, wherever you need to see them. No promises. Just presence.

Browse the full meaningful tattoos for women collection if you want to find the one that fits where you are right now.

References

Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.

Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis.

Kessler, D. (2019). Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Scribner.

About Virginie: Virginie de Landevoisin is the founder of MotivInk and the designer of every tattoo in the collection. With a background in design and a first-hand understanding of what it takes to stay motivated through hard seasons, she built MotivInk around one simple belief: that what you see shapes what you do.