It is totally, completely possible that your diagnosis was in error. Bipolar diagnosis, how it's done, how it should be done, who should do it, etc., has become a topic of huge and hotly contested debate in recent years. I don't know what meds you were taking exactly, but several years ago, I reviewed every paper ever published on the topic of discontinuing mood stabilizers in bipolar disorder. What every single one of those studies show is very clear. If you have bipolar disorder and you discontinue your mood stabilizer(s) over a period of less than 3 weeks, your risk of a big recurrence at/by 12 months is about 96% or so. Even if you have been completely stable for a period of at least 5 years and then discontinue your mood stabilizer, the risk of recurrence is about 90%--about half within the first 10 months.

So, to me, the take-home here is, if you have it, you probably won't be able to do well long-term off mood stabilizers. Some people do it, some on this forum do it very successfully, and that is awesome. But the studies suggest they are in the minority.

Now, someone might say, she got manic on an antidepressant--she definitely has it!! But not so fast, because some of the people treated with antidepressants who get mania on them are just misdiagnosed bipolar people--they always had it, they just hadn't gotten manic yet. But some of them also are probably just drug-induced mania and they don't have it. How many of these are there? No one has a clue. The biggest study was done in London (21,000 patients) and what it shows is that people treated for unipolar depression with SSRIs or Effexor, have a very, very low rate of becoming manic or developing other signs or symptoms of bipolar disorder. That does not mean those meds cause it. In my opinion, I think most of those people likely had it all along--but that is just my opinion and there are zero studies on it.

So, there you go. A little trip around the stopping-your-mood-stabilizer-in-bipolar literature. I think it is awesome that you are staying in touch with all your providers. That's great.
I did stop all my meds, btw. Did it pretty much as recommended. But still had a big recurrence 11 months later. I was great until then. Then, bam! That's how I know I have it. I tried. I did. But I just can't do it. I really hope you can.