Honesty, honestly!

There has been a lot going on in my life recently, and it has made me think more about my personal relationship with honesty.

For me, I think this relationship started back when I was in second grade, and I was diagnosed with minimal brain damage. I talk more about that in other writing, but this diagnosis had an interesting and very unsettling effect on my life.

Like Adam and Eve taking a bite of the apple, I learned shame. I learned to be ashamed of who I was, and the fact that I could not read as well as others my age was a secret everyone knew but that I needed to hide.

Each year, as I started a new semester with a new teacher, my parents would go and have a secret meeting with them, explaining my shameful truth. I always felt that I was a burden, a problem to be dealt with. Even when I was dreaming of attending the Air Force Academy and becoming an astronaut, I still felt that I had to hide.

Later on, new words would come to change my diagnosis from minimal brain damage to dyslexia and dysgraphia. But the course of my life continued as I was mainstreamed through the school system.

I learned to hide my disability as much as I could and work the system until I managed to graduate high school with honors and a B average, with a major in English, thanks to my abilities with a camera.

I worked on the school newspaper and yearbook as a photographer, and that counted as an English grade, so I received an A in both classes.

But at this point in my academic career, I ran into something of a brick wall called the SATs. Like most of my classmates, I sat the test, but I got 640 out of 1600, 28% below average. And so I was rejected from entering Cal State Northridge.

My sister Susan and I have always been somewhat competitive when it came to education, especially since she managed to skip second grade while I, with my learning problems, had to take it twice. As a result, we ended up in the same grade and graduated from high school together. So, since she was going to CSUN, I had to as well.

So, for the first time in my life, I decided to step away from my shame and embrace who I was. I contacted the Handicapped Students Office (this was before "disabled" became the politically correct term) to see if there was a way that I could be accepted there.

The counselor I met with was very supportive and helped me through the process of qualifying to enter as a disabled student. As I recall, I was the first learning-disabled student to attend the school directly from high school. There were some others who had gone to junior college first.

I was accepted to the school, where I not only got a seat in class, but I also qualified for other support. They helped me get books on tape, proctoring for tests, tutoring, and pre-enrollment for classes, so I did not have to struggle to get the classes I wanted.

I also became active at the school, helping to develop a program for LD students and speaking to students studying to become teachers about my experiences as an LD student. I like to think I helped humanize the way LD students were treated.

I understand that some of the work I did also helped at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where they developed a program for LD students. The Air Force Academy had been a dream school for me.

Because I stepped out from behind my shame and embraced the fact that I had these difficulties, I was eventually able to earn not only my associate's degree but also my baccalaureate.

I remember when I would talk to groups or people about being LD that I would tell them that it was a hidden disability, that as long as it was hidden, it was a disability.

What I meant was that as long as I kept my disability hidden, I was allowing it to limit me. Once I stopped hiding it, I could get the help I needed and do things I might otherwise never have been able to do.

This is one of the main reasons I have been so open in the rest of my life about who I am and what I am going through. Including things like my blog, where I talk about things that many people might be uncomfortable sharing.

Things like my wife Linda's drug addiction. I remember so clearly how much being honest has to do with getting out of drug addiction. At the beginning of every AA meeting, they talk about how their program helps, but only if you can be honest with yourself. That worried me because I knew Linda could not be honest with herself.

I have lost count of the number of times she would tell me that she was no longer addicted, and I would tell her she was lying. I knew when I heard that she was putting down her guard. When I saw her getting all dressed up to go to her meetings and acting as a driver to help others get there, I felt she had turned the meetings into social events and was missing the point of them.

What made this particularly troubling was that she was still using drugs while doing all these things. She wasn't telling me or her therapist, and I don't think she was admitting it at the AA meetings either.

I remember an argument I had with Linda back when we were engaged. I had mentioned that while, as a pilot myself, I could easily understand how the conditions at the time could have caused John-John Kennedy to crash his plane, I was still suspicious about the circumstances surrounding his death, including the rumors that Hillary Clinton had something to do with it.

When I said that, Linda responded by telling me that I had better never let anyone know that I thought that way.

I responded by asking why she wanted me to lie.

I was very surprised when she told me that would not be lying.

I have never understood her point of view that somehow my not telling the truth was not lying. We spent several minutes trying to convince each other that avoiding the truth in this way was or was not lying, and we never did agree.

And that is why I have been so torn over my mother's recent passing. For three years, my family has been aware of her condition and that she was going to die. After all, she was in her 80s. But whenever I mentioned including information about what was happening in my blog or on Facebook, I was told that she would not want people to know, that she was ashamed of what was happening. And so I have not spoken of it here until after she passed away. And that is why you may have noticed some discrepancies between what I have said publicly and what others in my family have been saying, including in her obituary.

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but on the other hand, I don't want to be dishonest by avoiding such an important part of what has been happening in my life.

I have friends who tell me that honesty is one of the most important things to them, that they are always honest and that they never lie. And while I might agree with them in some ways, on the other hand, I see that they limit their honesty to very specific things. They may be honest about how they feel, what they think, or even about the past.

But when it comes to keeping their word, the whole concept of honesty seems to elude them. While you can accept what they say about what they do or don't like as the truth, if they tell you they are going to do something, you need to take that with a major grain of salt.

I, on the other hand, admit that I try to avoid conflict and may, on occasion, attempt to put the best face I can on something. I'm not lying, but I'm not completely revealing my real feelings either.

My friends, on the other hand, will hardly ever follow through with the things they say they are going to do. They may be honest, but they are also completely unreliable, and that, of course, brings their statements about honesty being the most important thing to them into major question.

I think to end this, I will quote from Les Misérables.

Can I conceal myself for evermore? Pretend I'm not the man I was before? And must my name until I die Be no more than an alibi? Must I lie? How can I ever face my fellow men? How can I ever face myself again?

To me, these are some of the questions that come up when I think about my own views of honesty.

— Odell Sneeden Hathaway III