I'd suspected bipolar for about a decade before I was actually diagnosed with it, but there's a big difference between merely suspecting a thing and hearing it pronounced by a man with a batch of impressive degrees on his office wall. IOW, I was blown away.

It was good to have a name for the shadow that had dogged me almost all my life, but at the same time I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of being "mentally ill". THAT took a while. But I did learn to accept it, as well as the fact that I have to be medicated in order to function at a reasonable capacity, and now I'm doing really well.

You'll get there. It takes time, but it does happen, and when you're stable you won't even feel like you're BP anymore. I promise!