Welcome to the To-Doula, or, How to Not Suck at Stucco Maintenance

I was cleaning up the back patio last weekend when I noticed a sizable crack in the stucco of our South Philly row home. I am no Bob Vila, and my husband will be the first to admit he doesn't know a hammer from a handsaw, so this task is a pretty good candidate for To-Doula-ing. Like a fledgling stick-and-poke tattooists, I am going to practice on myself. In hopes that creating a public-facing and possibly useful framework for others who are exhausted by working/parenting/simply trying to survive these trying times, I am going to coach and love and teach myself the way I would for others. I am going to attempt to use the combined powers of artificial intelligence and my personal "community of care" to push past lethargy, apathy, and overwhelm to get sh*t done. 

When I shared this spark of an idea with one person, they told me that all anyone would think of when they heard the word "doula" was childbirth, and so it would not be a good word to frame this work. In some ways, she's right: According to DONA International, a doula is “a trained professional who provides continuous physical, emotional and informational support to their client before, during and shortly after childbirth to help them achieve the healthiest, most satisfying experience possible.” But the term, having had doulas present at the birth of both of my children, goes beyond that of simply childbirth, as evidenced further by the growing popularity of "death doulas". To me, the work of a doula centers primarily on guiding their client in finding the strength to persist through an intense, uncomfortable, or unpredictable experience. Why, then, can't that same approach be applied to other experiences in people’s lives more, from the mundane to the major? It can be too easy nowadays to slip into ineffective or even harmful patterns when faced with new, scary, or difficult tasks. By putting to active practice what I'm preaching at my day job, and by repurposes the skills I've developed in my nearly two decades in the field of education, it is my hope to create a system for helping people move through the toughest, most painful items on your to-do list while learning how to activate your personal community of care and build practices to make future challenges more manageable.

Let's see how it goes!

Here is the "recipe card" template I'm planning to use as a guide for Project #1: Cracked Stucco. I gathered this initial intel by asking ChatGPT a series of questions. Let's see how good the advice is! I will post updates on how it's going as well as the challenges and motivation strategies I employed to get myself to TASK COMPLETION. I'm going to give myself a two-week deadline, so if I don't have those cracks filled by 5/11/23 please yell at me!