A Habit of Self Deceit

A Habit of Self Deceit is a conceptual telling of the history of my parents and my relationship with them. In the fall of 2016, my mother left the home she shared with my father for almost 25 years to live in a facility that could manage her care 24 hours a day. After not interacting or talking with them for the better part of three decades, I started to visit them once a month in an effort to support my father and help him transition to a new living situation. The book's title comes...
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A Habit of Self Deceit is a conceptual telling of the history of my parents and my relationship with them. In the fall of 2016, my mother left the home she shared with my father for almost 25 years to live in a facility that could manage her care 24 hours a day. After not interacting or talking with them for the better part of three decades, I started to visit them once a month in an effort to support my father and help him transition to a new living situation. The book's title comes from a concept in existentialist philosophy coined by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, bad faith, which describes the habit people have of deceiving themselves into thinking they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice. It is also commonly understood as to mislead or deceive another.