Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
In 1941, the most famous woman in the world walked away.
Greta Garbo was 36. She had made 27 films in 19 years. She had been nominated for Academy Awards, had changed how women dressed and wore their hair, and had a face so famous that photographers built careers on a single frame of it. Then, after one bad movie and two decades of being hunted by reporters, she retired.
Temporarily, everyone assumed.
But, in reality, she never came back. For the next 49 years she lived at unlisted addresses behind fences and walls. No interviews after 1955. No autographs. No premieres. She became the patron saint of privacy, forever attached to the line she delivered in the movie Grand Hotel: “I want to be alone.”
Except she hated that line. She spent decades correcting it.
“I never said, ‘I want to be alone,’” she told Life magazine. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone.’ There is all the difference.”
“Let alone” is a boundary. It says: I decide who gets close, and when.
“Alone” is a wall. It says: no one does.
Garbo asked for the first, but she built the second. And the world, which had taken everything else from her, finally gave her exactly what her walls demanded.
The Thorn
In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer asks you to imagine a thorn embedded in your arm, resting directly on a nerve. Anything that touches it sends pain through your whole body. The soft brush of a shirt sleeve. A firm handshake. A leaf swiftly blowing past.
To deal with this reality, you have two options. You can remove the thorn – a painful process that is likely to leave a scar. Or you can make sure nothing ever touches it.
Most of us choose option two. But, in the long run, it’s not the easier path.
You can’t risk rolling onto the thorn at night, so you build a special bed. You can’t risk a stray elbow jamming into it, so you stop playing sports and design a special protective pad to wear around people.
Every device serves a purpose – to protect the thorn from being touched or to solve a problem the last device created. And, it works. But, every solution also shrinks your life a little more.
Singer refers to this path as building a thorn-shaped life. We work so hard to protect ourselves, we inadvertently make it impossible to be anything more than safe.
This reality isn’t weakness. The devices we construct to protect ourselves are brilliant. Think of the engineering. Look at the foresight, the discipline, the sheer competence it takes to construct a life where nothing ever touches the thing that hurts.
High achievers don’t build flimsy walls. We build masterful fortresses.
Your Walls Have Names
There are three types of walls I see in my clients’ constructions most often.
Competence. You became the person who never needs help. There probably wasn’t any when you actually needed it growing up. In response, you got so good at anticipating needs and figuring out how to get them all met that you have it handled before anyone else even thinks to ask what you need.
Somewhere along the way, “don’t worry – she’s got it” stopped being a compliment and became an assumption. People don’t offer to carry things for the strongest person in the room. Why would they? But, now you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders and no one around who can help bear the load.
Radical boundaries. You learned, probably the hard way, that closeness is dangerous. You had way too many experiences with people who got their “ick” all over you. The ones who lied and manipulated and laughed at your discomfort. The people who were cruel or unfair or actually unsafe. So you got serious about access and those boundaries saved your sanity or maybe even your life.
But somewhere the gateway to you stopped having hinges. What started as “I decide who gets close” quietly became “no one does.” You went from guarding the door to bricking it over, and you called the brickwork growth. But, now no one sees you, no one connects with you, and you keep shouting over your walls for love, but no one can hear a thing.
Intelligence. You learned to live in your head because being in your body or feeling your feelings was far too intense. You learned to think faster than everyone else. You see connections others just plain miss. And, you can analyze your way out of any discomfort. You cite what happened to you and what you’ve learned from it chapter and verse. The patterns and problems you’ve overcome are fully intellectualized.
It sounds like insight, but it functions like armor. You stopped connecting for real a long time ago and the people around you have no clue how to get in. They tell you how they feel and all you hear are the logic flaws and assumptions they have made. They share something that lights them up and you feel bored and vaguely irritated at the triviality of their interest. You are desperate for connection and unable to co-experience life with someone else.
Each of these was adaptive once. Each of them worked. That’s what a Monarch does: you Adapt to survive something real, you Achieve because the adaptation is genuinely useful, and then, without ever deciding to, you Attach. The protection stops being something you do and becomes someone you are.
The Wall Is Not A Welcome Mat
This isn’t just philosophy. It’s physiology, too.
Researchers at Stanford studied what happens when people suppress their emotions in conversation, keeping the face calm while the inside churns. Ie – the exact performance you and I have perfected. They expected to find costs for the suppressor, and they did. Habitual suppression is linked to lower social support, less closeness, and fewer people who actually know you.
But the finding that stopped me cold is what happened to the other person.
When someone talked with a partner who was suppressing, the listener’s blood pressure went up. Their body registered a stress they couldn’t name. And in paired conversations, when one woman hid what she was feeling, it measurably reduced her partner’s desire to know her further.
Your composure isn’t neutral. It’s having the exact opposite effect you were going for. The people trying to reach you can feel the wall even when they can’t see it, and their nervous systems quietly advise them to stop trying.
This is the cruelest mechanic of the whole thing. The wall doesn’t just keep people out. It convinces them they were never welcome in the first place. And then, standing inside the fortress you built, you wonder why nobody checks on you.
I work with the people no one checks on. This is why no one checks on them. Because everything about how we learned to survive signals the people around us to stand clear.
Garbo’s Heartbreak
Garbo’s walls held for half a century. By every measure, they worked. She was let alone – so completely that her solitude became legend.
Then, decades after her death, Sotheby’s auctioned her private letters. Thirty-six of them, mostly in pencil, written to her closest friend in Sweden.
They are full of loneliness. Depression. Homesickness that never lifted. In one of them she wrote, “I am almost always alone.”
The most protected woman of the twentieth century, who simply wanted a little space, sat inside her beautiful fortress and grieved.
Walls don’t know the difference between a threat and a request. They keep out the reporters and the friends, the intruders and the casseroles, the people who would have used you and the people who would have loved you.
There Is All the Difference
Boundaries are necessary sometimes. And, having them is not bad. You just have to know what you’re building when you’re constructing it because a wall and a boundary look identical from a distance.
Up close, one of them has a door, and you hold the key. “Let alone” means you still get to say yes. It means the protection serves you instead of ruling you. It means somebody, somewhere, has standing access to the real thing. To you, without all the devices and armor and walls.
Singer also offers us another option. The thorn can actually just come out. The original sensitivity that required all this protection probably looks different through the eyes of the person you’ve become than it looked when it lodged itself in your skin. You are different. Stronger. Smarter. More experienced. And, way more brave.
This is the doorway into what I call Ascend. The fourth stage of survival, the one nobody tells the cycle breakers actually exists. You don’t ascend by getting better at protection. You ascend by needing it less. By building a life shaped like you, instead of the thing that hurt you.
This is exactly what Monarch is for. To give you the community and connection you need to move beyond the identity that’s burning you out. And into a world that starts lighting you up.
You spent years training the world not to check on you.
Let’s go train it back.
Monarch is a community for the people who can’t stop surviving their lives. If this found you behind a wall, I hear you. Grab that key and let’s open the door – together.
