The pain of self improvement is that by the time you improve, the people you improved for are no longer there to bear witness to it, even though your failure to do good by them was the inspiration to become better. To put it another way, it’s a wound that never heals. Always open. Always bleeding. Is closure possible? Even if you were to find new friends, new lovers, it’s not quite the same. Perhaps we can frame things a different way, then.