I wasn't diagnosed properly till age 53, but when I got that dx, it caused a whole lot of things that have happened over the past 45 years or so to make sense. In fact, I think it all started around the time I was five or six, got progressively worse over the next few years, and then really crystallized when I had my first serious clinical depression at 13, starting a couple of months after my grandmother died.

Naturally, I never put the depressions, which happened every few years or so, together with the wild-and-crazy periods where I partied and drank like a fish for months at a time. I also did some incredibly dangerous and foolish things, like take off to Ensenada for a long weekend with some acquaintances from work, and threaten people with garden implements when they pissed me off.

So yeah, I'd say I've had bipolar for the vast majority of my life. Too bad I had to be so stubborn and stupid to deny what was fully in my face for the past decade or so.....I was just scared that I'd have to take lithium, and of course I believed the term 'bipolar' itself implied that one was crazy.