One concept that I really like is the idea of microactions, which are tiny actions that aren’t even big enough to be considered “steps” to achieving a goal. They can be useful when you’re feeling like I was when I wrote my last post, as if everything is too much work and far too complicated.

The article Inch by Inch: Microactions by Mary LoVerde has a good overview:

Microactions are teeny tiny steps that propel us forward without threatening our sense of control. They get around our fears because we commit to something so little we could hardly be afraid and we’re guaranteed success. They’re much smaller than steps and often so ridiculous that we outfox our resistance to change.

Sometimes, when you do a microaction, it provides you with so much momentum that you actually find yourself achieving a goal, or at least taking a couple of steps toward doing so. The example in the article is of a woman whose microaction was to put on exercise clothes, and she felt silly standing around in exercise clothes and figured she might as well go for a walk. You can’t go into it expecting that to happen, though, because then you might be too freaked out to even take a microaction since you feel like you’d have to immediately follow it up with a bunch of other stuff you’re too tired to do, or you just do the microaction and feel disappointed in yourself for not accomplishing anything big. Sometimes you will accomplish something bigger, sometimes you’ll acclimatize yourself to a certain microaction so that it becomes part of your routine and it won’t take so much effort in the future, and sometimes you’ll only manage to do one tiny, little thing, and that might be the only thing that you do all day.

And sometimes that’s okay, because doing something is better than doing nothing.

A bit of looking around online shows me that Mary LoVerde is the author of Stop Screaming at the Microwave! : How to Connect Your Disconnected Life. I have always thought that was the best title for a self-help book that I’ve ever heard. I don’t know if I’d actually find the book itself helpful if I ever read it, but I can tell you that every time I see it in a store, I feel a bit better, because the title makes me giggle. Stop screaming at the microwave! Hee hee hee.

On a slightly related note, just in case you don’t understand how much of a dork I am, whenever I write a to-do list, the first item on it is always “Write to-do list.” That means there’s always something I can cross off right away, and it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher is one of my favourite books. It’s probably my favourite memoir of all time. My eating disorder has never been that serious, but I can relate to the author eerily well. It was often as if I was reading about what was going on inside my own head, only expressed much more eloquently than I could hope to do so myself. I’m a good writer, not that it’s evident on this blog… but Marya Hornbacher is an amazing writer, and I am in awe of her. The book is an honest an insightful portrayal of illness, although I wish she had written about her actual recovery. Even more than that, I’ve often wished that someone would write a book about manic depression that was just like Wasted.

So I was pretty excited when I was reading the People article about “Britney’s mental illness” (no, I’m not even going to go there right now) and there was a sidebar about Hornbacher’s upcoming memoir, Madness: A Bipolar Life. There are some very annoying annoying things in the book description, but at least I know Hornbacher didn’t write the jacket copy herself:

At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type 1 rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is.

Ugh. Yeah, I’m also rapid-cycling bipolar I, and so what? Do not brag about how your manic depression’s penis is bigger than other people’s, okay? This is not something where you can just whip out a tape measure and settle the matter once and for all, and even if you could, it would be pointless. There are sucktastic things about all flavours of bipolar disorder, and mental illness one-upmanship is really tacky and helps nobody.

Also, Hornbacher’s fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change the current debate on whether bipolar in children exists.

This is another one of those don’t-even-go-there things that is probably unfair of me to comment on until I’ve read the actual book.

I can’t say I like the title much, either, but I’m still dying to read the book. Probably there will be parts that will annoy me, and there will be parts that I love, like this passage from Wasted:

People who’ve Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I’m touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself.

Or this part, where she falls down and is too weak from starvation to get up:

Halfway home I began to run, a faltering, stumbling run, eyelashes fluttering with snowflakes, face numb, hair falling into my face with the weight of wet snow. I slipped and fell and could not get up. I sat there in a heap in front of the vice president’s mansion. I, up-and-coming young journalist, A student, maniac, starving artist, invisible basket case, me. I cried with an impotent fury at my legs for refusing to stand when I told them to and thought of my cousin Brian as my hands, pure white, indiscernible in the white snow, scrabbled about trying to collect the contents of my bags which had spilled. I thought of my brilliant and wonderful cousin, dear friend and lifelong confidant, who’d been in a wheelchair since he was small. I thought of how he must feel every day, legs refusing to work, through no fault of his own, through some miserable joke of God, and I thought: This is your own fucking fault. Get up. GET UP. I hated myself with a pure and fierce energy and I wished myself dead.

I don’t hate myself anymore. It’s been a long time since I did. But that excerpt says everything you need to know about the way I felt back when I did hate myself.