About EEDA

It all started, as many things do around here, with my (Patricia) being irritated. I’ve been an avid reader of self-help for years and while it’s never one-size-fits-all, I was irritated that almost everything I read rarely resonated. The advice in the books I was reading was for an audience that could outsource their domestic labor to follow their own dreams or build their elaborately stacked habits. These books were for an audience who could afford to lean in at work or be bravely vulnerable because they weren’t BIPOC or queer or disabled. These books were not for people who were physical or financial caretakers of non-children family members.

In short, these books were for people not like me or my wife or many of the other people in my circles. This all makes sense, of course, because the writers and creators in the self-help genre are nothing like me, my wife, or my community. Self-help is overwhelmingly white, cisgender, heteronormative, non-disabled, thin, religious, or any combination of these and more. If self-help is written by BIPOC authors, it is still generally cisgender, heteronormative, non-disabled, religious, etc. On top of that, it often also includes a hyper-productive, rise & grind, very capitalist approach to things.