I'm bipolar as well. It runs strongly in my family, so about half of us have some form of it. My doctor is a specialist in the area, and he said that at least half of his patients have advanced degrees. He gets a lot of people who are in med school. So it definitely isn't an intelligence thing and you can still be successful. I am curious though. If you are actually bipolar, you should have had some episodes that affected your life, or at least the other people in your life. You also seem to have been diagnosed awfully late in life. Does your sleep schedule change? Like, do you go through phases where you sleep 3-4 hours a night and then ones where you want to sleep constantly?