What is my true self and what is my bipolar symptoms?

Amazing, is it something about carpentry that is very appealing?! What are your plans for the kitchen though? P.S. Having no cabinet doors can be considered quite chic!
Anyway, on the serious side; I think of SOME of the things I get into when hypo as defenately extensions of who I am, since I am a person who likes to create and find practical solutions. So then I am quite comfortable thinking of my BP as making some kind of strange sense, if only as a more extreme version of myself. But then it is the stuff I do that is out of caracter for me. And very destructive, especially with shopping...

I don't talk about it much, but if I do, I usually say I've been diagnosed bipolar because to me that's all it is...a diagnosis used to identify a specific type of treatment. Outside of the medical model, I am just myself, making mistakes and screwing up; but I take responsibility for that as myself and not a diagnosis, even if it contributed.

Besides, who knows what it will be called in 10-20 years, or what the true cause of symptoms are. Maybe we're all something different, with different causes, but bipolar is the smallest lump of symptoms they can identify. I'm finding a lot of physiological issues are underlying my symptoms; and I'm getting as much, if not more, relief from alternative medicine as I do from my meds. I don't ever want to settle for I am this, or I have that. Not while we're still in the dark ages of mental health treatment.