My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Found Closure by Revisiting a Painful Place
By Iris, 45 — San Francisco, CA
Finding closure is one of those phrases people use so casually, as if it is something you pick up at the store on your way home from work. I used to say it to my own clients — gently, carefully — believing I understood what it meant. Then last September, I drove four hours to a beach I had not visited in eleven years, and I learned that finding closure is not about ending something. It is about letting a place tell you a different story than the one you have been carrying.
The beach was in Mendocino. A small stretch of rocky coastline with driftwood piled at the tideline and fog that rolls in so thick it erases the horizon. I had gone there once with someone I loved, during a period of my life that later collapsed in a way I still have trouble naming. Not dramatically. Not with a single event. Just a slow unraveling — of a relationship, of my confidence, of the version of myself I thought was permanent. After it ended, I could not think about that beach without my chest tightening. So I simply stopped thinking about it. For over a decade, I avoided the entire stretch of Highway 1 north of Bodega Bay.
The Last Time I Was Here
The last time I stood on that beach, I was thirty-four. I remember the wind was sharp and the man I was with had gone quiet in the way that means a conversation is coming. We had been together three years. We had built a small, careful life around each other — dinners on Sunday, a shared bookshelf, the kind of intimacy that feels permanent because it is quiet. But something had shifted. We had stopped talking about the things that mattered. Not because we were angry, but because we were both afraid that saying what we actually wanted would mean admitting we had been pretending.
That weekend in Mendocino was supposed to fix it. A getaway. A reset. But you cannot reset a relationship by changing the scenery. We walked the beach in near silence, and I remember looking out at the water and thinking: I do not know how to say what I need. Not to him. Not to anyone. Not even to myself.
We broke up two months later. It was mutual and kind and it hollowed me out anyway.
In the years that followed, I built a career helping other people navigate exactly this kind of loss. I became a therapist. I got good at sitting with someone else’s grief and holding space for their confusion. But my own — I had packed it into a very neat box labeled “resolved” and placed it on a high shelf where I would not have to look at it.
What Finding Closure Actually Looks Like
The idea to go back came from a client, oddly enough. She was describing a place she had avoided for years — a park where she used to take her daughter before a custody battle changed everything. She said she wanted to go back but was terrified of what she would feel. I asked her what she thought would happen. She said, “I think the sadness will swallow me whole.”
I gave her the careful, clinical response. We talked about exposure, about reclaiming spaces, about the difference between avoidance and protection. But after she left, I sat in my office for a long time, thinking about Mendocino. About my own avoidance dressed up as moving on.
It took me three weeks to commit. I told my partner, David — we have been together six years now — that I wanted to go alone. He understood, or at least he said he did, which is sometimes the same thing. The night before I left, I could not sleep. I lay in bed running my hands along the edge of the sheets, feeling the texture of the cotton, trying to stay in my body instead of spiraling into anticipation. I had bought one of those small warming massage stones from HiMoment a few months earlier, mostly for the tension I carry in my shoulders after long days with clients. That night I held it against the base of my neck and focused on the heat until my breathing slowed. It was not a revelation. It was just a small, physical kindness I gave myself permission to accept.
I left at six in the morning. The drive up was quiet. I did not play music. I let the road sounds fill the car — the hum of tires, the occasional rumble of a truck passing. Somewhere north of Point Reyes, the fog started. And I felt my body respond before my mind could catch up. My hands tightened on the wheel. My jaw clenched. The fog was the same. It was exactly the same.
When I pulled into the small gravel lot near the trailhead, I sat in the car for fifteen minutes. I was not crying. I was not panicking. I was just — pausing. Letting the reality of being there settle into my bones. The parking lot looked smaller than I remembered. There was a new wooden sign. Someone had left a pair of sandals by the trailhead, sandy and sun-bleached, like a small offering.
Learning to Be Present in a Place That Once Broke You
The beach was shorter than I remembered. Memory stretches places, makes them larger, more significant than their physical dimensions. The driftwood was still there, stacked in silver-gray tangles along the high tide mark. The rocks were the same dark volcanic stone, slick with algae where the waves reached. But it was a Tuesday in late September and I was the only person there, and that changed everything.
I walked to the spot where I thought we had stood that last time. I could not be sure — eleven years and erosion had shifted the shoreline — but I found a flat rock near the water and I sat down. The stone was cold through my jeans. The wind was sharp, just like before. And I waited for the sadness to swallow me whole.
It did not come. Or rather, it came, but it was not what I expected. It was not the sharp, chest-crushing grief I had been bracing for. It was something softer. A tenderness. Like looking at a photograph of someone you loved when you were very young and feeling not the loss but the fullness of having loved them at all.
I sat there for a long time. I noticed things I had not noticed before — the way the foam traced patterns on the wet sand, how the seabirds angled against the wind with a patience that felt deliberate. I noticed my own breathing. Slow. Steady. My body was not afraid. That was the surprise. My body, which had carried the tension of this place for over a decade, was not afraid.
I thought about David. About how, when we first got together, I had struggled to say what I wanted. How I would swallow my needs and then resent him for not guessing them. It took two years and a very patient couples therapist for me to understand that the silence I had learned in my previous relationship was not self-protection. It was a cage I had built around my own voice. David and I had to learn to talk about the things that scared us — desire, disappointment, the small daily negotiations of sharing a life. Some of those conversations were terrible. Some of them cracked us open in ways that let more light in. But we had them. We kept having them. And each one made the next one slightly less terrifying.
On the beach, I thought about the woman I had been at thirty-four. The one who could not say what she needed. I did not feel pity for her. I felt gratitude. She had survived something she did not have language for, and she had kept going. She had learned, slowly and imperfectly, how to speak.
What the Beach Gave Back to Me
Before I left, I did something that would probably sound strange to anyone who was not a therapist or a person who has ever tried to make peace with a place. I took off my shoes and walked to the water’s edge. The Pacific in September is brutally cold — my feet went numb within seconds. But I stood there, letting the waves wash over my ankles, and I said out loud: “I am not the same person who stood here before. And that is enough.”
Nobody heard me. The words disappeared into the wind and the crash of the surf. But I heard them. And something in my chest — something that had been knotted tight for eleven years — loosened. Not all the way. But enough.
I drove home in the dark. Somewhere south of Petaluma, I called David. I told him about the beach, about the fog, about standing in the freezing water saying things to no one. He listened the way he always listens — fully, without rushing to fix anything. Then he said, “I’m glad you went.” And I said, “Me too.” And we sat in the comfortable silence of two people who have learned, through years of practice, that you do not have to fill every quiet moment with words.
When I got home, the house smelled like garlic and lemon. David had made dinner. I ate standing in the kitchen, still in my coat, sand in the cuffs of my jeans. He did not ask me to explain more than I had already said. He just handed me a glass of wine and kissed the top of my head and let me be a person who had done a hard thing and come home from it.
That night, I took a long bath. I brought the warming stone and pressed it against my sternum, feeling the heat radiate into my chest. I thought about my client, the one who was afraid the sadness would swallow her. I thought about what I would tell her now. Not the careful clinical language about exposure and reclamation. Something simpler. Something like: the places that broke us do not stay broken. They change, the way we change. And sometimes going back is not about finding what you lost. It is about seeing, clearly and for the first time, what you built after.
I am forty-five years old. I am a therapist, a partner, a woman who still carries tension in her shoulders and sometimes forgets to say what she needs. I am not healed in the way that word is usually used — clean and finished, a closed door. I am healing, which is messier and more honest. And last September, on a cold beach in Mendocino, I learned that closure is not a destination. It is a moment when you realize the story you have been telling yourself about a place — about yourself — is no longer the only version. There are others. Softer ones. Truer ones. And you get to choose which one you carry forward.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: Relearning Intimacy After 18 Years of Marriage and How to Talk to Your Partner About Trying Something New. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
