Acceptance! Seriously... I think until we accept that we are who we are we will continue to struggle. I can't tell you how to do it though, but I can tell you what worked for me. Acceptance came for me just by accepting that I am who I am. I put aside the " mentally ill" and negative tones of implications of such a dx. I look at it as more of just who I am, it's just part of my human experience. Everyone has battles, so if they don't have bipolar they have to battle something else. No ones life doesn't have hurdles, this is just mine. I also tend to not view myself as bipolar, I just am this way, this is how my brain works, what can I do to work with it?

I know what I need to do to beat this, I know I can do it. I didn't always feel like that tho. It took a lot of soul searching, trying different things out, changing my thought process, being open to new ideas, and for me it took unmedicalizing myself. I found that the more I saw dr's and my t and the more I was involved in being a sick person the sicker I was. I'm not saying to not see dr's at all tho, just that it's easy to get caught up in the medical aspect of this and close the other doors. They see the same thing with cancer patients, being overly medicalized can have negative effects on our being.

I try to take it one moment at a time, If I look at it from a view seeing all the mood swings to come, they will forsurely come and I will drown in them. If I look at what is right in front of me I can swim through that. I feel like if I look at it like a sentence of suffering, I will prophasize it and it will become so. Perspective is my key to dealing with bipolar, and the other things in my life, it's not always easy, but the more I practice it the better it gets.