Hello Lysta and welcome. Please don't worry that your post may seem less than positive. Sometimes life is pretty negative. While we can't cure you , we can certainly allow you to vent out some of life's frustrations and having any major, hard to treat illness is very frustrating.
How do you find motivation? There are thousands of books written on that subject and I disagree with almost everyone of them. As I said, I can't cure you, but perhaps I can share part of my story and maybe that will help some, it might not either.
The roots of my bipolar go back to my child hood and at times I was a difficult, easy to anger child/teenager/adult. I tended be be either an over achiever or an under achiever with little in between. I did very well in my chosen career until illness took it away from me. I was treated for a wide variety of mental disorders for many years , none of which were right and when they finally did get the right diagnosis is was very hard to find and then get the proper treatment.
Along the way, I lost most of my friends and ticked off most of my relatives permanently. I've never owned a home(it's hard to do when you blow every penny you have during manic phases) and at times I became all too knowledgeable about our court system.
Probably the best thing I ever read was that I had to have some hope. I learned to have hope by seeing just how ill others around me were and then watching or listening to how they got better. My own favourite saying is that I must be going to heaven, because I've been through hell(the extended tour LOL) and the devil didn't keep me.
I'm nobody special and I can't say that I'm well, but I am better and I do enjoy life again 9 days out of 10. Nor am I saying that my illness was any more or less worse than the next persons.
So after acquiring some hope, what did I do next? I had to take ownership to my illness. It wasn't my fault that I got ill, it wasn't my fault that I did some stupid things or blew money like it grew on trees and it certainly wasn't my fault that some of my docs were less than expert in mental illnesses. However it was my illness, not my friends or relatives or even my doctors and no matter what happened or who I blamed, I was still going to be stuck with it.
It would be easy and hypocritical for me to say that I took charge of my own illness and that I got better all on my own. I didn't. However on my good days, I did force myself to learn about what possibly might be the correct diagnosis and then what might be the right treatment. That took a lot of time. First I didn't have a lot of good days when I could concentrate and learn and secondly, I had to learn how to get doctors to think outside of the box and be willing to take some of my suggestions. None of that happened over night or even remotely quickly.
I also had to learn to set priorities. For example, as much as I wanted to lose weight, that had to go on the back burner and only now, after many yrs, am I having any success and I'm still far from being in shape (well round is a shape LOL) .
As I got better I had to keep adding in more and more self help. I had to learn about my early warning signs and what I could do about them, I had to learn about my triggers and how to avoid them and I had to control my own life style. Along the way I've managed to make a lot of new friends and that also has helped.
But it all started with having a little hope for the future and doing what I could on my better days. I also had to remember that I was a good person with a bad illness and not a bad person with good excuses. That also meant forgiving myself for some of my past mistakes and learning how not to feel bad about my current weaknesses.
So please feel free to ask a lot of questions on here, answer other people's questions and/or use the forum to vent out some of life's frustrations. Take Care. paul m