Yes, I know, I'm inputting a lot tonight. I just finished the second half of the show about manic depression (bipolar disorder). I already knew quite a bit about it since I suffer from a variety of it. With bipolar II you don't get the wild highs like with regular bipolar. My highs are what most people would consider "normal" and my lows are very low. Which sucks cause I know if I could get a good manic high for a couple of days I could get all the work on my camper done, hehehe. Anyway, in this show Stephen Fry (British actor) talks to other bipolar people to see how they cope, what their symptoms are, etc. He also asks them if they could press a button and all their bipolar symptoms would disappear, would they do it? Most of them said no, they would not. Which to "normal" people might sound incredibly odd. It makes perfect sense to me tho. I've suffered with this illness since I was about 10 years old. It's at that age where I first wanted to kill myself or just lay down and die, whichever came first. There were so many years where all I could see was the inky blackness of the tunnel and didn't even realize there was an end to it. A severely stressful job and a marriage made in hell pushed me over the edge a few years ago and it was worse than it ever had been. Thinking back, I spent most of the time from age 10 to around age 25 trying to be "normal". I wanted to fit in. I didn't want to hear my own voice in the back of my mind telling me I was worthless, fat, ugly and stupid. I couldn't make it shut up tho. I didn't want offhand comments made by others to wound me to the point where i could bleed to death. Sounds weird, but I don't actually know what it's like to be "normal". I haven't been anywhere close to "normal" for most of my life. Even before the depression I was an exceptionally bright kid and very shy. Any time you are very smart your life just isn't "normal". I tried and tried and tried to be like everyone else. Thank god I didn't succeed. I think I am a much more interesting person than anybody who is "normal" could be. I fight with my condition every day and still sometimes experience horribly low lows, but they aren't as bad or as often as they used to be. I feel that I am holding my own and getting my life back. Now, without my ex-husband around I can try to begin to believe that I'm not a bad person, that not everything is my fault, and that only a******s don't pay their child support. Plus, for someone with bipolar, not being bipolar is a scary thing. Just like "normal" people don't understand what it's like to be bipolar, we bipolars don't understand what "normal" is. We feel that we are normal until we decide we might be a messenger from god or maybe even the reincarnation of Napoleon or something. We fear a big change like that as you would fear becoming suddenly bipolar. If you see what I mean.