I wrote an Author POV column over at Shotgun Honey entitled “We are unreliable narrators of our own lives:”
Self-deception gets in our way, trips us up, makes us do bone-stupid things. We all suffer from it from time to time. Luckily, most of us recognize this and, at least sometimes, try to compensate the best we can.
But sometimes we don’t confront our self-deceptions until it’s too late. For me, that happened when I was coming out of graduate school with an eye on a tenure-track teaching gig. Turns out, the entire professional landscape for college professors—and especially the job market—had shifted in a major way while I was locked away inside the ivory tower, and I’d failed to notice it.
Wait, scratch that. I had noticed it. I just used my own powers of self-deception to convince myself it wouldn’t affect me. Spoiler alert: it did …
Self-deception is probably the primary theme of How I’m Spending My Afterlife, but it wasn’t until I had actually published the book that I fully understood how it had once also applied to my own life. Click on over to Shotgun Honey to read the whole thing.
