Sable Monroe

I Learned to Smile While I Was Plotting My Exit

There are survival skills you learn in childhood that are supposed to expire.

Mine didn’t.

One of the things I learned very young was how to separate what I was thinking from what I was showing.

Internally, I could be furious.

I could be disgusted.

I could be mentally dismantling the person in front of me piece by piece.

Externally?

I could look perfectly fine.

I could answer politely.

I could play the role.

I could let somebody believe they still had influence over me long after I had emotionally packed my shit and left.

That skill helped me survive my mother.

Unfortunately, I took it with me.

First, I Learned to Act at Home

When you are a child living under somebody else’s jurisdiction, honesty is not always the safest policy.

That sounds terrible because adults love telling children to be honest.

But honesty assumes the person receiving the truth is safe enough to hear it.

Sometimes they aren’t.

If you live with a controlling parent, announcing every private thought can make your situation worse.

“I don’t respect you.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“I don’t believe anything you say about me.”

“I’m leaving as soon as I can.”

“I’ve already stopped seeing you as an authority.”

Those may all be true.

They may also be strategically stupid to say out loud when the person still controls your housing, transportation, money, documents, freedom, or ability to make your daily life miserable.

So I learned something else.

Keep your mouth shut and play your part.

Not forever.

Just long enough.

I Had to Separate the Role From the Person

My mother had a version of me in her head.

There was the foolish daughter.

The dreamer.

The one who supposedly didn’t understand life.

The one who would never amount to much.

The one who still needed her.

Fine.

Let her have that character.

I knew she wasn’t me.

That distinction mattered.

Once I mentally dethroned my mother, I stopped treating her descriptions of me like instructions.

But I didn’t necessarily need her to know that.

I could let her talk.

I could let her think she was still shaping me.

Meanwhile, privately, I was examining everything she said.

Her judgment.

Her contradictions.

Her choices.

Her predictions.

Her failures.

Her hypocrisy.

You cannot remain an unquestioned authority in somebody’s mind once they start studying you closely enough.

That was part of what saved me.

I didn’t merely decide she was mean.

I decided she was fallible.

Then I went further.

Sometimes I decided she was a fucking fool.

Not very enlightened.

Extremely effective.

Dethroning Worked Because Her Words Lost Their Teeth

This is the part I think people miss.

Dethroning wasn’t valuable because insulting my mother in my own head made me feel rebellious.

It was valuable because it changed the source of the information.

If someone you deeply respect tells you that you’re stupid, worthless, incapable, undesirable, or destined to fail, the judgment carries weight.

But what happens when you stop respecting their judgment?

Now the same sentence arrives differently.

“You’re not going to amount to anything.”

According to whom?

“You’ll never have that life.”

Based on what expertise?

“You don’t know what you’re doing.”

And you do?

Once I started examining the person delivering the verdict, I stopped automatically examining myself.

That was the trick.

I stopped standing trial every time she opened her mouth.

She could keep issuing judgments.

I had stopped recognizing the court.

But You Cannot Let Every Thought Escape Your Mouth

This is where strategy matters.

Because once you stop respecting somebody internally, disrespect has a way of trying to escape externally.

Sometimes it did with me.

I was still a teenager.

I wasn’t always disciplined.

Sometimes the thought came right out of my mouth.

That could create consequences.

So over time I got better at separating internal freedom from external performance.

You can think:

This woman has lost her fucking mind.

And say:

“Okay.”

You can think:

I’m leaving the minute I can.

And say nothing.

You can think:

You have absolutely no idea who I am anymore.

And still play the daughter she expects at dinner.

That isn’t weakness.

Sometimes that is how you keep the tiger calm while you work your hand out of its mouth.

Then Childhood Ended

Here’s where I stop making myself sound noble.

Because this skill didn’t disappear when I turned eighteen.

I carried it into adult relationships.

That changes the moral equation.

As a child, strategic performance helped me survive someone who had structural power over me.

As an adult, sometimes I used the same ability because it was useful.

And useful is not the same thing as innocent.

I have been in relationships where my internal world and my external presentation were nowhere near each other.

I could be angry as hell.

I could be plotting an exit.

I could be planning retaliation.

I could be thinking some genuinely vile shit.

And then I could turn around and behave like a loving partner.

Kiss.

Smile.

Talk normally.

Make dinner.

Lie next to somebody.

Let them believe everything was fine.

Meanwhile, there was an entirely different conversation happening inside my head.

That is not something I’m particularly interested in dressing up.

I did it.

Survival Skills Don’t Ask Permission Before Becoming Personality

People like to talk about childhood survival mechanisms as though they remain neatly contained in childhood.

They don’t.

You practice something for six years during one of the most formative periods of your life and then everybody is surprised when you become fucking good at it.

I learned to conceal.

I learned to observe.

I learned to keep information to myself.

I learned to let somebody underestimate how far away from them I already was.

I learned that the person who knows less about what I’m thinking has less power to interfere with what I’m planning.

Those skills were incredibly useful in one environment.

Then I kept using them after the environment changed.

That’s where survival gets morally interesting.

Because sometimes the weapon that saved you becomes the weapon you reach for simply because your hand already knows where it is.

I Can Be Loving and Still Have Another Room in My Head

This is probably one of the less flattering things about me.

There can be a separation between what I feel, what I intend, and what I reveal.

I can genuinely love somebody and still withhold enormous pieces of my internal life from them.

I can care about somebody while simultaneously evaluating whether I need to leave.

I can be affectionate while furious.

And, yes, I have been capable of behaving lovingly while privately planning things that were not loving at all.

Human beings like cleaner categories.

Good person.

Bad person.

Victim.

Villain.

Loving.

Deceptive.

But sometimes the same person is all of those things at different moments.

Sometimes in the same fucking afternoon.

I don’t think surviving my childhood made me evil.

I also don’t think surviving it made me morally pure.

It trained me.

There’s a difference.

The Dangerous Part Is When Strategy Becomes Automatic

The childhood version had a clear objective:

Get through the house.

Stay psychologically intact.

Do not give away every thought.

Do not hand your plans to somebody who might sabotage them.

Leave when you can.

Adult relationships are more complicated because sometimes the other person actually does have a reasonable expectation that the version of you sitting across from them is real.

That’s where the old skill can become ugly.

Because if every disagreement becomes an intelligence operation, intimacy doesn’t stand much of a chance.

If you are constantly performing one emotional reality while privately living another, the other person may be in a relationship they don’t even know is ending.

I know that.

Knowing it has not erased the skill.

It has simply made me more aware of when I am using it.

I Still Know How to Play the Role

That’s the truth.

Put me in a situation where I believe showing my full hand will cost me, and something old wakes up.

The face gets calm.

The information gets limited.

The internal conversation gets louder.

I start observing.

Planning.

Waiting.

Sometimes that instinct is appropriate.

Sometimes it absolutely is not.

But I understand where it came from.

Before I learned how to leave openly, I learned how to leave privately.

Before I could change my circumstances, I learned how to change my allegiance.

Before I could stop playing the role, I learned how to remember that the role was not me.

That distinction protected me when I was young.

Later, it made me dangerous in ways I’m willing to admit.

I learned to smile while I was plotting my exit.

The problem with becoming very good at a survival skill is that nobody tells you when the war is over.