Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere

by Maria Bamford

am very fond of suddenly adopting a new set of ideals in order to receive welcome from any rigid group of weirdos. If these people wanted a piece of me so badly, I must have been okay. (I am not okay.)

Joining cults and reading self-help books are both symptoms of a kind of desperation.

there’s always going to be a black sheep and it may as well be you.

The desperate attempt for perfection combined with an underlying resentful rebellion toward anything perfect is really my familial role in a nutshell lying errant on an otherwise spotless lawn.

All-or-nothing thinking. This book sucks. Overgeneralizing. This book, like everything in life, sucks. Mental filter. All I have in life is this free fucking book. Discounting the positives. Even burning this book doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be more copies of this book. Magnification. This book will kill me before I kill myself. Mind-reading. The guy who wrote this book knew I would hate it. Fortune-telling. I know I won’t complete even the first page of this book.

Emotional reasoning. I hate this book. Ergo, I hate this book. “Should” statements. I should be grateful for this noxious book that is free. Labeling. I hate this book, and so I hate all books. Self-blame. It’s all MY fault that I’m here in the loony bin stuck filling out this book that was some shady pay-to-play deal struck with the Seventh-Day Adventists by David Burns, MD. Blaming others. GODDAMN YOU, BURNS.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway.”