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For most people, moving on after a central part of their lives ends may be sad, but it isn’t usually devastating. The end of a relationship, a job, or a home can be challenging; you don’t know what’s next or how your life will reconfigure. Some people, however, particularly those who’ve suffered difficult early losses, may fear that their lives won’t reconfigure. For them, endings of any sort can seem ominous. I know. I have that person. Ending a seven-year live-in love relationship in my thirties left me with the confusing combination of relief, as if landing on the far shore of a river I wasn’t sure I could swim across, and dread that I’d landed in a place so foreign I’d be lost forever.

It took me a year, but I did recover from that breakup and settled into a happier ongoing romance. But it was harder still to recover from an ending I didn’t want, like the one I faced after being “terminated” from my first big teaching job. The morning after I’d gathered a couple of thousand people to hear Gloria Steinem, whose feminism the college administration spurned at that time, I was told I was too political and given the boot. Many years later, it’s still so painful; I wonder if I’ve ever fully recovered.

Even Minor Endings Can Feel Overwhelming

Okay, these two endings would count as........

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