I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath
And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy

- lyrics by Eminem (hook sung by Rihanna)

I bristled so badly at any hint of "you have a mental illness" from anyone. I also derided myself terribly about it, felt like a total pariah, and, well, most of you know the story. Bottom line, hated myself for it.

I think I'm accepting it a lot more, because I am "becoming friends with the monster".

What that means is - I don't fear it like I did. I no longer see it as a grave threat to my survival. It's beginning to become just another annoyance in my life. Yes, at times I still get triggered and upset, yes, I'm taking prozac and lamictal (but instead of being ashamed and afraid of it and feeling like I was taking it under duress, I kinda like it now ), and yes, I can talk about it a little more without all of the drama and hyperbole and having my hair stand on end and getting a big flight or fight reaction.

As long as I can be a completely functional, completely normal crazy dude, I guess I got no problem with it. It's kind of like some of my other issues, like asthma, I wish I didn't have it, but hey, it's pretty easily treated after all. Not a game ender.

This is an ENORMOUS turnaround for me. Two years I fought this tooth and nail, going to real extremes to obfuscate, cover up, and deny, questioning everything.

I still question symptoms and "what I have" - I know, it isn't functionally important, but I'm the kind of guy who likes concretes, definitions, and certainty. I would feel better, I guess, if I weren't in the grey zone of DSM land, where everything has the same symptoms and there are no tests that are measurable and quantifiable and start with drawing a vial of blood or putting someone under a CT scan machine. Nope, it's all just someone's opinion, and trial and error of "what works".

I still want a name for it. Bipolar spectrum? PTSD? CPTSD? Both, all, none. That frustrates me. I don't know which road to travel if I don't know the name and the treatment plan and goal, because they aren't the same.

I definitely have some symptoms consistent with bipolar. $$$ is the main one. I keep taking these online tests, and the results are always that I score very low. However, they are kinda crap, in that they are really transparent and sometimes ambiguous. But PTSD also correlates to so many of these symptoms. And so many conditions overlap in symptoms as noted above.

When I read patient accounts of bipolar, most of the time I go "that's not me, I don't do that." When I read patient accounts of CPTSD, I generally can say, "yes, I do that". And I score very high on the online PTSD screening tests, but again, they're pretty transparent. A good, sophisticated test keeps you guessing how it will score out.
Still, this is huge.