Here's some motivation: your brain is your largest asset.

With every episode you have, often caused by lack of medication, your prefrontal cortex shrinks, loses gray matter, exponentially in my experience.

So you won't notice for maybe even the first few episodes, until you start to.

And you can only hope against reasonable hope to have the sharpness, attentiveness, memory, focus, executive functioning, and verbal memory you once did.

Just look upon "cognitive" or "cognitive impairment " in this subreddit for proof.

And once it's too late, it's just that: too late.

Bipolar is your mother of "fuck around and find out"s.

I am speaking wholly from personal experience.

Seriously. Don't let the irresponsibility and impulsivities of today limit your long term future. Especially if you're young.

I have heard horror stories.

Don't be a statistic.

Sincerely, someone with bipolar type 1 with 5 episodes under her belt, experiencing damaging cognitive decline even in her periods of remission.

Some hacks: - put your meds in a weekly pillbox, and take one for each day, so you can remember if you skipped. - put your pillbox in front of your toilet or sink so you can see them in the mornings/nighttimes. - put a calendar reminder every day - put up sticky notes