Maria came home from her belly dancing class last night and had a painful panic attack, I could see it the minute she walked in the house. It had to do with her performing as a belly dancer in front of other people, her belly dancing experience has been so powerful and important.

Maria and I are veterans of crippling anxiety and panic attacks, we have both learned that fear can kill a life as thoroughly as a plague. We’ve even worked out a protocol for dealing with it, it usually involves some meditation, love and support, and a warm bath.

I’ll leave it to Maria to write about what happened last night on her own quite wonderful blog, but it did get me to thinking about life with mental illness.

It was that kind of day. Red is hovering somewhere between great pain and healing, I upset a good number of my readers after writing a piece about identity and responsibility – we had a lot of disagreements about it – and a good friend called me in tears to talk about a painful talk she had with her therapist – it brought up some awful memories.

All of this brought me backwards a bit, old demons and questions swirling around in my head.

I told my friend what I have come to believe about mental illness, as someone who was in therapy for most of the second half of my life. I think I am lucky, as is Maria, to be able to recover every day.

If you have the worst forms of cancer, it is not possible to do that. I told my friend, who believes she is “set back to square one” every time she explores her  painful early years,  that this is a process and she is it.

She can learn to live well and happily with it, but there is no “Holy” moment of rebirth and redemption, recovering every day takes work every day, most of it invisible and incomprehensible to other people, to the “civilians” as we crazy people sometimes call them, people who live outside the combat zones of fear and confusion.

Maria and I both know we will never completely shed the ghosts that have shaped our lives and almost ruined them. This is work that is never done.  I joke sometimes that we are like first-responders, veterans of bumps in the road.

But there is good news – we are doing well, we are happy and safe, we get to recover again and again, to relapse and stumble and  fall down, and get up and feel strong and find the truth inside of our selves.

Most of us have shattered egos, we are spiritual craftsmen, we are always trying to piece them together again, they will always be broken.

Fear speaks to us all the time and in so many ways, but it requires self-awareness and spiritual discernment to hear its voice, see what we see and not what it sees, and read the signs in daily life that help to ground us and lead us forward.

Recovering every day means learning to be hyper-aware of our feelings and emotions, of our moods and impulses, of our stumbles and our falls. Other people take clarity and grounding for granted, I can never do that. Nobody can who has suffered from mental illness.

My Dyslexia, undiagnosed for so many years, has stirred the pot. I was quite astonished by the brief raging commentary over a piece of writing I thought was quite rational and well thought out. I loved the discussion too, although some people didn’t. It was, I wrote, the solution, not the problem.

People who live on the edge of life emotionally are outsiders always, they hear and see and feel things that most people don’t hear and see and feel. I will never be normal, I learned years ago, I will never stay completely out of trouble, I will never be liked by large numbers of people, or handle easily so many of the things that other people handle. I will never see the world in quit the same way as “normal” people.

Life is a wonderful challenge, a puzzle, an adventure.  Two days are never the same.

So we learn the read the signs – in books, in photos, in love, in friendship, in spirituality, disappointment triumph and despair, we w hard every day to live our way forward, to never quit, or succumb to despair.

There will be those days, those nights, those tests, those triggers, those nights staring at the wall or sitting in a warm tub. And there will be those days full of love and light and color and peace.

Isn’t that the quilt and texture of life? Sometimes I do think we are the sane ones, and everybody else is crazy. We get to really live and think about our lives.

I am so lucky, I get to recover every day.