About Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice
Tl;dr: Let’s disrupt self-help!
It all started, as many things do around here: I was 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.
Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Octavia E. Butler said, “You got to make your own worlds. You got to write yourself in.” So in January 2020 I started the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice newsletter. In this newsletter, I share bi-weekly essays that are self-help for those of us disappointed by self-help. In the alternating weeks, I dust off my Master’s in Library and Information Science and I share resources that can either improve readers’ lives or help readers improve the lives of others. The resources I share are almost always free and there’s an occasional book recommendation in there as well. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I am determined to share what I got.
In 2023, after talking about it for years, I convinced my wife Nicole to expand Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice to the podcast realm. She’s my #1 and I bounce most of my ideas off her. She often surprises me with things I haven’t yet considered.
There still aren’t enough BIPOC, queer, trans, neurodivergent voices in podcasting and while we will absolutely complain about it, we also want to be part of the solution so, well, here we are.
That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481.
You can find our podcast, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts.