Tale of the honest man.

This is something I had written for a fable in my little Aspergers self-help book.  I am doing a lot of writing for it and plan on picking the best pieces for what I hope to self-publish when I am done and satisfied with my writing.  If the writing sounds confusing, I apologize.  It's a rough draft.  It's a story of an honest man who finds out what real honesty is:

A man grew up being told to be honest when he speaks.  He took this with him and told everyone the honest truth about everything.  He even argued about when he was being honest and when he wasn’t being honest.  However, he was more often than not telling the truth, but noone else wanted to hear it.  The honest man stopped making his best effort to be honest with other people.  He started to wonder what he could do to make others happy.  What were people not understanding about him?

The honest man felt dejected.  He didn’t know what to do.  He couldn’t get what he wanted from other people because he was telling the truth the whole time.  He didn’t understand what was going wrong for him.  So he asked someone about why noone likes hearing him tell the truth.  The response he got was “People believe what they want to believe and they like to surround themselves with people who believe the same things.”  This got the honest man thinking that if noone wanted to hear the truth, that maybe he should start telling people the things they wanted to believe.

Eventually the honest man started to realise that by telling people what they wanted to believe that it made them happy.  The honest man was now becoming dishonest with himself because he was going against everything he believed in by doing this.  He was at a conflict with himself, but he was getting what he wanted from other people.  He was now getting more attention and respect for what he was telling other people.  Getting people to be around him became easier.  He realized he had control over people’s emotions as well.  He even found someone he loved and he felt he loved her too.

The honest man had now become a dishonest man and this was his conflict.  He was starting to lose sleep at night over the fact that he was going against what he believed in.  He was also getting tired of trying to keep his mask on.  He could feel his mask cracking and little by little others started to notice.  One person stopped communicating with him.  “Oh well,” he thought, “I’ll just find another friend.”  Other friends slowly disappeared as well and all that was left was the lover.

The lover was around the man enough to see him lose control of himself.  The man even fought so hard to keep her around because he feared with her gone, he would be nothing.  The lover did everything she could to be honest with him, but the man wasn’t listening to her honesty.  He believed the honesty was dishonest and not want he wanted to hear.  The lover gave up and left the man alone.  The man needed this more than anything even though it was not what he wanted.  She said to him “It doesn’t matter to me what you believe, I love you. And that is the truth.”

The man had to figure out for himself what happened.  He knew people didn’t like his honesty.  But he still didn’t realize why his beliefs didn’t matter to his lover.  He was confused by this.  His ego was bruised.  He didn’t understand how someone could love them if they didn’t believe the same things that he believed in.  He just didn’t understand that love wasn’t an idea in his head.  It was a feeling.  He realized that being in love was a state of the mind.  But love was a feeling.  The man couldn’t figure this out.  He even lost sleep over the fact that he couldn’t get what he wanted from other people.

Through some soul-searching on his own time he realized that the problem was he was never truly honest with anyone in his life.  He was never truly honest with himself.  He came to realize that the honesty others wanted from him were for him to express himself.  The truth he was telling was coming from the thoughts he had.  This wasn’t going to be considered honest for anyone but the man himself.  He eventually realized what he needed to do.  He needed to tell people how he really felt about them.  But first he needed to understand what he felt about himself.

At first the man didn't feel good about himself upon realizing what he truly felt.  He knew he compromised himself and he grew up believing in what he was told.  He realized the truth he was seeking was all about knowledge.  The more knowledge he accumulated, the more argumentative he got with other people.  This was a truth he realized.  He then realized that a good chunk of the knowledge he had was based off lies he grew up believing in.  He realized that this needed to be changed.  He started to realize the real source of honesty never truly came from his mind.  He was able to feel better by expressing how he felt about himself and went about changing the feeling from bad to good.  Soon he rediscovered some values in his beliefs and took what made him happy with him and left behind all the lies that made him unhappy.

He went back to the lover and told her that he loved her.  She accepted this truth and the two started to work things out.  He became more expressive of himself and he realized he needed to do this in order to be honest with people, and more importantly himself.  He did keep some thoughts and feelings to himself though when he knew it would be easier to keep that person sleeping at night.  The man knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear now and that was his honest feelings.