17/04/2025
It's Been a While I Used My Pen Here. Let's try this
THE WISE KING & THE POISONED WELL
I want to tell you a story, the Story of The wise king and the poisoned Well. There was once a king known not for his armies, but for his Clarity, he ruled a city where reason prevailed & Justice was real. People felt seen. He listened more than he spoke. He wasn't perfect, but he was wise and his wisdom held the kingdom together until one night, while the city slept. A witch came quietly and poured a potion into the town's only well. By dawn, everyone had drunk from it, everyone except the king, and by midday, the kingdom had gone mad. They spoke in riddles. They accused each other of crimes never committed. They forgot what day it was, they feared things that didn't exist. They praised things that had no meaning and yet to each other, they all seemed fine.
It was the king, who now seemed strange, distant, different, and when he tried to speak and warn them of what was happening, they looked at him with suspicion, they whispered behind closed doors. They called him unwell. By Nightfall they were ready to remove Him not because he failed, but because He stayed the same. So the King stood alone in his chamber, holding a Goblet of water drawn from the same well, and he faced a choice "drink and be accepted or refuse and be exiled" And that night, he drank. The next day the people rejoiced "our king is one of us again, He now Understands" But he didn't, he just gave up trying to be understood. And so, the madness continued.
This story isn't about Kings and Wells. It's about now, it's about you, because if you've ever hidden your Insight just to be accepted. If you've ever laughed at the wrong jokes just to avoid standing out, if you've ever nodded along when everything in you screamed No! Then you've tasted from the well, and maybe you didn't even realize it. Maybe you've been sipping for years, slowly letting go of the parts of you that saw too much, felt too deeply, spoke too early. Maybe you've adjusted your truth so well, that it now fits comfortably into conversations that used to feel unbearable
But underneath the Comfort is grief, the kind of grief that only comes from abandoning the truth to keep the peace. But the greatest danger isn't in being wrong. It's in losing yourself inside the collective. In trading your Clarity for Applause and giving up your mind so you don't lose your tribe. 🖊️
