Anna Palmer Speaks About Her Book Coming Home

Anna Palmer has received a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and psychology. She is a trained yoga instructor, and licensed massage therapist. Palmer has been in recovery from an Eating Disorder (ED) for three years now. She now is sharing her journey home in the form of a book, and we were lucky enough to catch up with her about her process and why she chose to take on this project.

Please tell us about your book!
It’s my life’s work. I’m 29 years old. It’s been many years in the making. I feel like I was able to apply knowledge from my life experience, just through my own experience with an eating disorder. For 10 years of my life, I suffered from anxiety and depression, all the things that come with an eating disorder. I am in my third year of recovery from that. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was temporarily out of a job; I’m a massage therapist and was not able to do that anymore. So, I realized that this was the time to sit down and write it.

What were some of the challenges you faced writing it?
I think it stirred up a lot of kind of residual emotions, which was surprising. Writing a book about experiences in the past, I didn’t expect it to be still charged. I felt like I had done a lot of work around those experiences. But, I would say that was unexpected. It brought up emotions; it brought up kind of the residual debris of those experiences. And I had to kind of navigate that terrain again.

The daily tasks of everyday waking up, and you know, bringing yourself to the computer and allowing that stream of consciousness to just flow onto the page in kind of a coherent manner. [It was] a little jumbled at first, but just doing that day in and day out for two months straight was pretty taxing.

You made a reference to sunflowers. Would you mind expanding a little bit more on that?
The sunflower image is something that really resonates with me and my journey. I read oracle cards, which is kind of like tarot cards. So, one of the decks that I utilize, it’s really beautiful artwork; the artist is Autumn Sky Morrison. I had picked it up a few years ago; it’s a picture of a sunflower and this woman’s hands at the center of the sunflower, with a lot of light at the center. The drawing itself is focusing on the light.

Sunflowers are always turning toward the light to get the most of the light that they can. So I feel like that, to me, is my journey. And I think the journey of a lot of us. Many of us have experienced trauma and darkness and a lot of pain in our lives. And we can get so mired in that and so caught up, and believe that’s our identity, and that’s who we are. But actually, like, turning back toward the light is the medicine to heal. That mis-identification with the darkness.

What do you hope to gain from your book being published?
I just really wanted to reach people who have been where I was. I had tried literally anything and everything under the sun to heal my eating disorder, and it just wasn’t working. I explored a lot of alternative modalities. I hope to reach people that might be feeling hopeless and not aware of what else they can do to heal.

So many people, obviously, in our culture and society are feeling really isolated. That’s a common theme that I don’t think has ever gone away. The more we can talk about the really hard things, the more we can find connection with others and feel less alone in all of this human experience.

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I think a lot of people can really resonate with that. Twenty-twenty has been a year of personal growth for a lot of people.
Yeah, absolutely. Like, we’ve had a magnifying glass on our lives and like our internal worlds, especially this year. It’s like, we’ve had to sit with our shit a lot this year. It’s not been comfortable, but there is a purpose. There is a purpose to what we need to face and heal in ourselves.

What helps you in the day-to-day? Just the normal, day-to-day tasks that sometimes feel the hardest to do, like getting up?
Yoga was honestly a big part of my recovery. With an eating disorder, you’re pretty disconnected from your body and your feelings, whereas yoga is very body oriented. So, yoga really kind of initiated me back into what does my body feel like? What does it feel like to breathe and to move intentionally? Yoga was reconnecting with myself again.

Was there anything I missed?
An eating disorder is a very specific manifestation of common issues that many of us face. People who might be reading this might be feeling or saying, ‘Well, I don’t have an eating disorder. I don’t really know what that’s like, so I might not be able to relate.’ I hope my book would be able to reach audiences beyond just the eating disorder community. The book really encompasses other things that all of us struggle with. Addiction and trauma, and low self worth or low self esteem, anxiety, depression. An eating disorder is just one manifestation of all those things.

You can order Anna Palmer’s book here.