For the past few weeks, I have been sitting with my friend Ed Gulley as he slowly succumbs to a virulent kind of brain cancer. People ask me if this is difficult, but the truth is that most days I simply feel grateful not to be lying in that bed. It seems quite selfish for me to feel sad.

I get to recover from my illness every single day. I suffer from mental illness.

I did not really accept the idea that I was mentally until I was 60 years old and simply fell apart and nearly lost my life.

That experience finally caused me to wake up and recognize the seriousness of my mental disarray and the need for me to get real help. I remain abashed by how long it took, although I also have discovered that I am in good company.

The National Alliance On Mental Illness reports that approximately one in five adults in the United States – 43.8 million – experience mental illness in a given year. About ten million of those people, says the alliance, experience a serious mental illness that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.

That was me. My illness substantially and almost completely interfered with many major life activities – love, sex, health, work, friendship, perspective, family and managing my life.

I recently asked a friend who has completely lost perspective on her life – she is living a horror story – whether she had considered therapy, and she looked at me as if i had just swallowed a toad. If it hadn’t happened to me, I don’t think I could have fathomed how someone in so much pain and difficulty had never considered getting any real help.

Yet so few people who are mentally ill ever get help.

But that is the thing about mental illness, it so often means that you can’t see how much help you are in, or accept it. When I said I thought she needed to see a therapist, she just blinked and said, “okay,” and she called on up. Anything can seem normal if you do it often enough, even sitting by the bedside of a dying friend.

My friend’s response was so simple I wondered why I had waited so long to say something. I don’t believe in giving unwanted advice and I don’t believe in telling other people what to do. But I’m glad I did.

I remembered what my own therapist told me. Most people who need help won’t ask for help or can’t afford to get any help. Most people don’t want to change. As a country, we are mentally ill when it comes to mental illness, and perhaps that ought not to be surprising.

I did ask for help and I learned some basic tools and insights that have steadied me and brought me close to the life I always wanted. My illness no longer interferes with life’s major activities, in fact it has helped to make them possible.

Mental illness was not a simple thing for me  to accept or deal with. The movies usually offer a “holy moment” where some movie star shrink says “it’s not your fault,” and the struggling patient sees the light and returns to his or her ordinary life.

But life, of course, is not Hollywood. And I no longer had an ordinary life. I had to build one, to start over.

I found that mental illness is very often treatable but not often curable. I understand that my mental illness –  trauma and anxiety issues –  will always be a part of me and will never completely go away. I have to be vigilant and self-aware. I have to carefully consider almost every decision I make.

I also have been diagnosed with Dyslexia and it is sometimes hard for me to know where that disorder begins and my craziness ends.

Dyslexia, as some of you know is a disease caused by disorders in the brain, which mix up things, including sounds, letters, and words. People with dyslexia sometimes have poor memories and difficulties in reading, writing and communicating with other people. They get confused by symbols and reasoning – math, organization,  machine  tasks.

All my life, I have been corrected by people who believe spelling and conjunctive clauses add up to good writing. It wasn’t until I figured out that this was a lie that I became a successful writer, work I have been managing to do almost all of my life.

My Dyslexia diagnosis was a relief, I finally understood why I had so much trouble learning things in school, while so many people were so eager to correct and lecture me on my unrealized potential. Social media are like that, it spawns legions of people who love to correct things. It was great to know I wasn’t stupid or lazy.

I have come an awful long way since I learned that I suffered from mental illness.  Mostly, the fear and panic that shaped my life is gone. I am learning who I really am and liking me for the first time. I know who to listen to and who to ignore.

The thing is, there is help, and help helps.

I understand the power of co-dependence and know to build boundaries in my life and respect them. I know to stay away from unhealthy people, or people who traffic in guilt, self-pity or manipulation. If it doesn’t feel good, run, don’t walk away.

I no longer give huge pieces of myself to other people, or take them from others. My illness taught me to look inward, not outward, for healing. I do not blame others for my troubles. I simply work hard to get better.

I have spent many hours now watching my friend Ed, a good farmer and family man, begin to die. He knows and I know and his family knows that he will never recover from the ten tumors rapidly taking over his brain and his body.

I used to feel sorry for people who had some form of mental illness, I felt pity for them. I do not feel sorry for them any longer.

I get to recover every single day.