It's funny.....since I "came out of the closet", I've found all sorts of people like us are out there. Even the Medicaid case manager for the assisted living facility where I work---we were chatting about one of my residents, then suddenly we wound up on the subject of mental illness and learned that we both are BP, that we're on the same meds, and that it's really, really hard to be a good consistent parent with this disorder. She's a lot younger than I and she's never had a mixed episode, but otherwise our stories are very similar.

Take-away lesson: it's OK to talk about bipolar. It's even OK to BE bipolar. What's not OK is allowing it to run our lives and using it as an excuse for bad behavior or failing to do something we should (but don't want to do).