I personally am starting to think that perhaps a large part of the problem isn't us who have bipolar. More and more, being on this forum and meeting so many intelligant people, I am seeing that it's not completely us with the issue here.

The world wants everyone to march in step to the same drum. Get up, go to school, get a job, buy a house, have a familiy, save money for retirement, retire, and having reached the reward of old age, do whatever until you die.

But in my job I see this more and more (and I'm talking what I observe of other people all around me,): Get up, go to school, get a job, struggle to pay bills, struggle to eat right, struggle to exercise, struggle to spend time with family, struggle to relax after stressful day, struggle buy medicine, struggle to fit in, suddenly old, not enough money to retire, have to keep working depsite being 70 years old / retired but now not enough money for medicine, suddenly can't drive to doctor appointments, suddenly no help from family or friends, suddenly alone and old, panicing because life is complicated!

We all don't fit into the box! A thousand years ago someone with schizphrenia or bipolar who sees things had a job. They had a place in the tribe. They were the shaman, the medicine man, the spirit talker, the oracle, the priest or priestess. They were important. Somewhere along the way, that fell out of the bottom, and we have the horror stories of assylums and tyring to "fix" people because the box of the "work at a job until you die" mentallity was born.

So, hey, it's not all us. I'm starting to think the problem is that we don't fit into the box and maybe we're not supposed to fit into the box! But the box we fit into has been pushed into a dark corner that no one wants to talk about, so maybe, just maybe, we struggle because our true purposes are not being served. This is just a theory....