Sable Monroe

I Don’t Leave Too Early. I Leave Just in Time.

I have never had my ass beat by a man.

That might sound like a strange accomplishment until you understand where I come from.

I come from generations of women who were hit by men. I grew up watching what happens when violence becomes part of a household. I know what it sounds like when the police come to the house. I know what it feels like when the adults call staying together “keeping the family together,” while the children are living inside the consequences.

So somewhere along the way, I developed a rule:

I don’t wait for the first hit.

People could say I’m too sensitive. Fine.

They could say I leave relationships too quickly. Fine.

They could say a man yelling at me doesn’t mean he would ever put his hands on me.

They’re right about that last part.

I don’t know that he would.

And I don’t intend to find out.

There is a difference between a loud man and a man who wants me to be afraid of him.

I’m animated myself. People get excited. People get angry. People raise their voices sometimes.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the moment during an argument when a man realizes his words aren’t shutting you up, so he reaches for something else. His voice changes. His body changes. He gets louder and more aggressive. He talks over you. Maybe he gets in your space. Maybe he punches a wall or throws something. Maybe he brags about having a terrible temper or “seeing red.”

He’s no longer trying to communicate with you.

He’s trying to intimidate you.

That’s my exit.

Maybe he would never hit me.

Still my exit.

Because I don’t need bruises to prove that someone has crossed my boundary.

I Learned to Dethrone People

I learned this much earlier than dating.

The first person I ever had to mentally dethrone was my mother.

When you’re a child, your mother occupies an enormous position in your mind. She’s the authority. Her judgment matters. What she thinks about you can easily become what you think about yourself.

That became dangerous for me.

So eventually, another part of me learned how to knock people off their pedestals.

If you hurt me badly enough, especially if I perceive you as threatening me, something in my mind changes.

I call it my protective side.

She’s not another personality. I don’t disappear when she arrives. I don’t lose time. I’m completely conscious of her.

But she’s different from the softer part of me.

The softer me can love you.

The protective me can make you ridiculous.

And let me tell you, she can get ugly.

She will inventory every reason I should stop admiring you. Every contradiction. Every flaw. Every reason your opinion shouldn’t mean shit to me.

She mentally dethrones you.

It isn’t particularly nice.

It is, however, remarkably effective.

Because once I stop respecting your authority over me, it becomes much harder for you to convince me that your insults say something meaningful about my worth.

Then I Became My Own Mother

Years later, a man I cared about became verbally aggressive with me in my own home.

He yelled. He cursed at me. He called me names.

And my protective side arrived.

Internally, I went straight to the gutter.

But externally, something much more important happened:

I got him out of my house.

I didn’t need to win the argument.

I didn’t need to stand there and prove I wasn’t afraid.

I wanted him gone before the situation had an opportunity to become something else.

Eventually, I sold that house and moved.

He never knew where I lived again.

And looking back, I realize that protective side of me functions almost like a mother.

Not my mother.

The mother I needed.

When I was a child, I used to wonder why we couldn’t just leave.

I had friends being raised by single mothers. Some lived in little basement apartments. They didn’t have much, but their mothers made those apartments warm and cozy.

I remember thinking we could do that.

We could have less.

We could pool our resources.

We could live in a basement.

We could be poor.

We could just live in peace.

I would have taken peace.

As an adult, I finally had the authority to make that choice for myself.

And I did.

Maybe I Didn’t Leave Too Early

I’ve had a lot of relationships.

Some ended because I was bored. Some because we weren’t compatible. Some because somebody crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.

Maybe somebody looking at my history could say I don’t stick around long enough.

But here’s the thing:

I never got my ass beat.

I broke that cycle.

I don’t know whether any particular man I left would eventually have become physically violent. Maybe none of them would have.

But nobody else knows either.

And I’m the one who would have had to live with the consequences of finding out.

So I don’t need to wait for a man to hit me before I take aggression seriously.

I don’t need to see what happens after he starts punching walls.

I don’t need to discover whether his “uncontrollable temper” is really uncontrollable.

And I certainly don’t need to prove I’m tough enough to handle him.

I’m not a fighter.

I’ve never been in a fight in my life.

Physical violence scares me.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been so good at avoiding it.

My strategy isn’t to survive the punch.

My strategy is to notice when somebody starts trying to make me afraid of the possibility.

If you need intimidation to win an argument with me, we’re incompatible.

If you need me to become smaller so you can feel bigger, we’re incompatible.

If your anger requires me to become afraid of you, we’re incompatible.

Call me sensitive.

That’s okay.

Sensitivity is only an insult if I believe enduring more mistreatment is some kind of achievement.

I don’t.

I come from women who endured.

I decided to leave just in time.