I haven't been stable since i was 12 so hell how the fuck do i know? but self-analysis in this direction is, i believe, ultimately futile. Everyone is influenced by the factors that change in their lives - even to the point of how much sleep, what they have eaten, or what they r thinking about and working on. i spent a lot of time earlier in my life trying to work out this very thing. i read some books about personality stuff, even self-help books. My god that was a mistake - works great if you want your intelligence insulted.
We are determined by our environment as much as by our personlity, simply by being human. With bipolar, our environment has less impact or perhaps MORE. Either way we react in extremis, or of course just ACT in extremis.

One thing that i do believe, and with conviction ("convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies." voltaire. i think i am taking it out of context huh?")
We live out our lives with such pain and such elation. we live each moment with INTENSITY. I believe that this is a power and a form of advantage in itself.
There is a kind of greyness that infects the world; i see it everywhere i look. I speak to a great deal of people through my work - and not normally about art. for some reason the conversations that i have almost always have a propensity to move towards questions of belief and ontology - life. What dumbfounds me again and again is that most people do not think about their lives; it is from one simple moment to the next. I think that i hyper-analyse and tend to think in circles because i am always drawn to the same conclusions. But within each predawn cyclic analysis i enforce my own convictions.

Not being curious, and not wondering what it is that defines US seems incredible to me; unfathomable and probably even just plain foolish.
But it is pandemic.
Shopenhauer (sp? hard one) advocated suicide as the ultimate existential choice. i don't agree, but this man, this PHILOSOPHER (which, importantly i think, breaks down from the greek to lover of wisdom) took his analysis and thought to its ultimate extreme. this is in and of itself, a powerful thing.

Because we are bipolar, often the choices that regular sane ppl can make is taken from us. I have thought about this too, particularly in the choice we have to take meds or NOT TO.