I still consider myself newly diagnosed (less than a year) and the "lifelong" aspect of actually having BP just keeps slamming into my reality, the way the airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. Yes, it's changed my personality some because now I have this shame and guilt from a lifetime of being part of a family who never knew how I was going to behave from day to day. Of course I can't go back and fix it; it's just that for the first time in my life, I'm able to glimpse what it must've been like for them to live with a bipolar wife, mother, sister. And I feel awful about it.