I hated my diagnosis and demanded to hear anything but that when they told me it in the hospital. I was manic and asked them to tell me I was schizophrenic instead. This is partly because I got diagnosed during mania not depression - might be a relief if it came during depressive symptoms? Additionally, my brother had a girlfriend when I was young who was bipolar (he is 16 yrs older than me) and he used to make fun of her - she was needy, clingy, 'wanted too much sex'. These were not things I identified with and I resisted/resented being lumped into that group, thinking I might be unemployed, homeless, living with my parents or even worse, cut off by family members any moment. Those were my first thoughts when I heard bipolar, and even though I was in a very good hospital, most of the people in there with me had lives I didn't want to have. These days, there are still a lot of things most bipolar people do that I don't do - I don't have concentration or money/spending issues, I don't have trouble with motivation and drive, I don't usually have trouble sleeping unless I am very sick, I have never smoked and I don't have a drinking problem. I just use the bipolar label to understand now where things go wrong (there are plenty of symptoms I do have). I don't resist it but mainly because I no longer assume the most textbook version of it encompasses who I am.