Coming Home

August 7, 2023
The Lettered Cottage blogger Palmer debuts with an earnest assemblage of essays that aim to guide readers struggling with anxiety “back to the treasure that will always be you.” Palmer recalls the “burgeoning battle with generalized anxiety that slowly, and then very suddenly, erupted into a daily struggle” in 2018, when a particularly destabilizing panic attack landed her in a doctor’s office with a skyrocketing pulse and a “fear of fear itself.” After visiting family in Minnesota failed to provide solace, she realized that “you can’t run away from yourself” and decided to lean “into the discomfort that comes with fear” by taking “little steps of courage,” among them picking up a paintbrush after a nearly 20-year hiatus from visual art (she writes that creativity can serve as a “lifeline when you’re in over your head”) and using exposure therapy to eat at a restaurant where she’d once experienced acute agoraphobia (thanks to the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways, “it’s never too late to learn—or unlearn!—
a certain way of thinking”). While the interspersed ephemera—including recipes, quotes, and a stray prayer—often feel superfluous, Palmer tackles anxiety with admirable nuance and honesty, and readers will be genuinely moved by her admission that “I didn’t write from a place of arrival...Coming Home is me not giving up.” This is just the thing for stressed-out readers seeking gentle guidance.