Welcome to PC!!

I know how that feels. I have to take quite a bit of medication to accomplish it, but I'm currently stable and doing well. I do have a lot of conflicting emotions about needing five drugs just to be reasonably functional, and even so I just became unemployed again after only four months at a job that was admittedly over my head. But life before meds was virtually intolerable, and if I want to live any kind of normal life, I have to be medicated.

Not everyone does, though. In fact, there are a number of people here with bipolar who don't take meds at all, and they do about as well as the rest of us.