1. What brought me to bipolar forums is that i like to write and compute and and like to give and get support. What brought me to PC is that i hung out on the About.com bipolar forum for years until it became poisonous. I became frightened by a post there one day and never went back. I like it here but some things about the About.com app were better, like how you could address your message to a specific member and they would get an email notice and reply and it was more like a conversation, more back and forth. Here when you write a message often times you don't get any feedback and it's disheartening.

2. The silliest and dumbest things people have said to me about bipolar are: A.) One woman in my Scrabble club said her relative was 'wacky and probably bipolar' and B.) One woman in a church group said she didn't like mentally ill people. Both times i kept quiet. I'm not really 'out' tho i guess i changed my avatar to my face so maybe that is changing!

3. No one has really given me a good piece of advice about bipolar. Well, maybe my GP once said to seek to 'modulate my hypomania, not squash it entirely.'

4. A random fact about myself is that i was into competitive Scrabble for years and i memorized all these high-scoring seven-letter words in 65 groups called 'bingo stems' of about 30 words each and they all have silly mnemonics called 'anamonics.' Some of them were: "Did it twice in bed with picky former lover," "Lonely bride humps TV" and my favorite "A.M. handsome, P.M. dogface"! I won Bingo Champ that season over all the elite players and got a certificate!