The day before New Year's Eve this year, I found myself standing in the exact same place as I had precisely a year earlier. A weird fluke, unnoticed until I was standing there surrounded by the same people, had led me across countries, up past cities to a specific beach on the Israeli-Lebanese border for the second time.
As I sat on the beach on the last day of December, watching a red sun sink down into the silvery ocean, I was surrounded by people I had grown to love last year, which I spent abroad, living and volunteering in Israel. It should have been a moment of peace and closure — literally coming full circle.
But that’s not how it felt.
Instead, I felt for a second like nothing had changed in the past year — when, in reality, everything had. And as much as I sometimes wish I was still in the same place as I had been last New Year’s Eve, it’s a scary feeling to feel like your life has stood still and made no progress.
Closure is a word I think we have all been brought up hearing over and over again with no real explanation as to how it feels or how we know when we’ve reached it. Coming back to New Jersey for college was more than a small adjustment. Last year at this time, I was just starting to feel really comfortable, happy, and at home in my new life. Now, I feel like I am still far from that point in my college life, in part maybe because of my inability to let go completely of the experiences over the past year that have transformed who I am.
In the week since the new year, which I spent visiting the country I used to live in, I have thought a lot about the idea of closure. And honestly? I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically bullshit. People, experiences, and emotions don’t disappear in a moment and healing is a long and frankly very frustrating process. I know that I have to come to accept the fact that the relationships, places, and even language that were my home and my refuge last year are no longer part of my daily life.
However, trying to force myself to just “get over it” has not really been working.
I might not have built as many support systems, relationships, and accomplishments up in my college life so far, but luckily I have a longer time to work on it than I did last year. I think it’s okay to walk around with a little bit of longing for last New Year’s Eve and the magic of my year abroad. What this new year has brought, though, is the idea that there’s nothing wrong with not feeling closure all at once, even if a coincidence like my identical New Year’s Eves hint at the opposite.
