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

by Maria Bamford

I’ve read and reread Mary Karr’s Lit, William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold, Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast, Madness by Marya Hornbacher, and, of course, genius Daniel Smith’s masterpiece on anxiety, Monkey Mind.

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

If you have any mentals, you probably know what I mean. I’m not suicidal, but I’m also not particularly psyched.

It wasn’t until she died that I realized that what she called GOOD was arbitrary. GOOD means known, but it’s also a conscious decision to see it as GOOD.

In the months before she died, my mom posted on Facebook a well-worn quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the definition of success: To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the beauty in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

We share this explosive passive-aggressive dance, a sort of social bulimia, in which we simultaneously try to connect with someone (because we’re lonely) and at the same time send the message that this person is UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO US WHATSOEVER.

I sit down to talk with you at a party and either monologue my current act for forty-five minutes or s-l-o-w-l-y inch my way farther and farther away while lobbing a barrage of questions over an impenetrable wall of anxiety.

FYI, my dad’s all-time favorite quote is by Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel: “Don’t be so humble—you’re not that great.”

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.

I know I am limiting my work by keeping myself safe from rejection. But that’s okay. Life is short, and it’s more fun to spend it where you’re welcome.

You’re not good at things. Even if you practice them for hours. IT IS OKAY NOT TO BE GOOD AT THINGS DESPITE ONGOING, TREMENDOUS AMOUNTS OF EFFORT AND DESIRE TO IMPROVE.

I am not an extrovert, and these ploys usually work. They are also how I have made friends and continue to participate in society. Three steps: name, compliment with name, non-yes-or-no question with their name. After that sequence, I’m lost. If someone knows what to do after that besides staring into their phone, let me know.

After my opening gambits, if I’m with a stranger in a public place, I’ll often give myself a job in order to keep talking to the stranger.

Of course, speaking to people in memorized dialogue prompts (“Get the customer to say yes, yes, yes!”) can be effective, but it lacks that messy, awkward mumbling that I believe is called “authentic human connection.”

After all this time, you would think I’d be bored with finding out the numbers on the scale, but it is forever engrossing to me, like runes or a mood ring or a horoscope, but with far less meaning.

In an example of OA fearmongering, when I ended up attending the outpatient treatment program, one of the ED program mandates was that you had to learn to eat everything—that no foods were “bad” or “good”—and I got drop-kicked by my OA sponsor.

Twelve-step programs are rife with mottoes that people repeat solemnly as if rhyming, repetition, and puns are the equivalent of wisdom.

So how do I reconcile my atheist hypocrisy while still attending these groups? My favorite twelve-step slogan is Take what you want and leave the rest. This one slogan is how I’m able to rationalize my attendance and constant rule-breaking.

I love my fingers and how agile they are at getting things in my mouth as quickly as possible—so much faster than a fork!

I started to feel better with only a small side of weep. (I didn’t realize at the time that most people don’t hard-cry every day.)

My atheism slowly developed alongside the growing realization (which dawned on me while I was experiencing the highs and lows of LA) that the world is abominably unfair AND filled with love? I’d eventually come to the conclusion that “God” could very possibly be a combination of privileged luck of the draw and an overuse of caffeine.

It’s a bit of a pattern I have. It’s called “phoning it in,” or “trying to get away with the least possible amount of effort.” It’s my calling card.

The Artist’s Way, for good or for ill, gave me the permission and inspiration to go do exactly what I wanted to do without anyone (but the now elderly and probably exhausted Julia Cameron) for support. Turns out Julia C. is also bipolar. That would have been good to know.

My mom claimed that the reason she took Depakote was because of seizures that she had in her twenties. Yet she was still on Depakote forty years later, and when she tried to go off it in her seventies along with adding an injection of a steroid for a physical ailment, she went full manic and tried to leave her marriage of fifty years and drive to the Twin Cities with ten thousand dollars in cash. (She was hospitalized involuntarily and put back on Depakote.)

Meds have changed my life. In a deep and what feels like a lasting way, they have allowed me to maintain what I understand now to be a “baseline” mood. I don’t feel high, but I also don’t feel really low (unless I have an alcoholic beverage I’m not supposed to have). And here’s the kicker: I still want to stop taking meds.

I just want to provide a cautionary note about the following tome that I felt ashamed didn’t work for me. And that is what cults always say if you end up not being into it: “You’re afraid/you’re just not willing to really commit to yourself (yet!).” Those fuckers. The added pressure of being offered this kind of help when you really need help is that you feel doubly bad when it doesn’t work for you. The book I’m talking about is called Ten Days to Self-Esteem, by David Burns.

If a guy is joking about how much he hates his wife, the odds are pretty good he hates his wife. Just FYI, next time you’re hardiharring at the ironic misogyny/racism/rape joke of your favorite emcee, know that they may be a misogynist, racist rapist.

Scott loves painting and he loves the people he loves, but the outside world—with the exceptions of music, babies (from a five-foot distance), animals of any kind, and his friends Drew, Ed, Jeff, and Jessica—can sometimes overwhelm him. Like me, Scott—and do not try to approach him—is not classically “charming.” I ADORE THIS ABOUT HIM. Because that is what I’m like, not immediately likable. You will KNOW if he likes you, but it could take a while.

We were three months into our relationship when we decided we needed a therapist. We were six months in when we attended our first marriage preparatory weekend. We were one year in when we headed to Seattle to learn from THE GOTTMAN INSTITUTE the GOTTMAN METHOD.

One of the Gottman principles is that couples need to remember the positive, wonderful experiences they’ve had on the regs. Yes, that is helpful. We have had a TON of good times. But to mythologize a narrative in which we disallow any of the rough experiences would be disrespectful to just how much we’ve done together.

Saying “Hang in there” to someone who has experienced months or decades of mental illness with no end in sight is the height of cruelty. I am not encouraging you (sexily?) or anyone else to (glamorously?) kill themselves. But I have total empathy for those who do. I have friends and family members who have died by suicide, and who were heroes for holding on as long as they did with unimaginable suffering.

To the friends and family members of people who experience suicidal thoughts or have attempted suicide: Maybe don’t, uh, admonish them? Like, “Hey, you, never do that again, you got that, you Dummie™?” It’s an illness. People sometimes die of it. It’s nobody’s fault.

Like most people, I’ve thought of suicide between eight and ninety times per day since around the age of nine. At forty, I gathered a bunch of pills from all the new prescriptions I’d been given over the years and thought about it seriously, but I never took them. I went to the hospital instead. Even regarding suicide, I’m not a can-do person.

There’s a powerlessness that takes hold, as in any other disease—a sense that when you get sick, you might not make it. When this happens, you may not remember that there is an official document in your junk drawer that you’ve signed promising everyone not to kill yourself. The unfathomable anguish in your brain is begging you 24-7 to immediately stop the madness.

But if I or anyone else dies of suicide because of whatevs haunted house is in their head, I just want to celebrate that I or you or anyone else was out there crushing and grinding for as long as we could.