A year ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that causes extreme highs (mania or hypomania) and extreme lows (often severe depression and a sense of hopelessness).

People with bipolar don’t tend to do things in halves. We are either all in and the most enthusiastic player, or not present at all, living instead with the crushing weight of a depressive phase.

It’s an exhausting existence.

Being diagnosed with bipolar explained a lot for me. The extremities of my existence came into focus. All the moods and the severe bouts of depression, all the periods of intense need for more of everything – more people, more work, more stimulation – were put into context.

However, finding out I was bipolar also began a period of observation and scrutiny of myself and from others. Was I manic or just excited? Was I circumstantially sad or about to enter a period of debilitating depression? Before I let the feelings in, I doubted myself.

Dating in the shadow of this self-doubt can be incredibly disheartening. I feel held back and held down – both chemically through the medication I take for my condition, and through the constant second guessing of my thoughts and feelings.

The buzzing, excitable feelings of attraction feel so similar to the initial stages of hypomania (a less intense form of full-blown mania). It’s difficult to discern the positive sensations of meeting someone new from the potential signs of the onset of mania. When I’m depressed, those feelings are buried so far beneath the gloom that it’s almost impossible to recognise them.

Not long after my diagnosis, I went on a date with a poet who I’d met on a dating app. Sitting closely on a sunken couch in his share house living room, he turned and looked at me earnestly and asked who my favourite poet was.

“Sylvia Plath,” I replied, partly because it was the truth, and partly because I enjoyed the dark, brooding humour of the answer as someone who was clinically depressed.

He jumped up and pulled out an anthology from the bookshelf and launched into a reading of ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ – unbeknownst to him, a poignant and ironic choice. I sat and listened, dropping my eyes briefly to savour the dark refrains: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.”

How could I tell him that I was the Mad Girl, that I was the one who felt things both too deeply and not at all at the same time?

Instead, I played the part I thought I should: I had sex with him, even though I’d have rather stayed sitting in the poetic gloom instead.

Casual sex and dating are complex for someone who is bipolar. Psychiatrists see an increased sexual appetite as a warning sign of potential mania – something to be addressed and even treated. They label it as hypersexuality, but it can also just be a symptom of a desire to date. The lines are blurred, and can make it almost impossible to date without a sense of impending doom or of doing something ‘wrong’.

Hypersexuality in bipolar can indeed be dangerous – often if you’re in a manic state, your judgement is skewed and your sense of personal safety can be compromised. It’s a fine line to walk, and an even finer line living a bipolar life that is both balanced and fulfilling.

As a young woman with bipolar, I struggle with my relationship to sex. Something that had been such a fun and invigorating part of my life is now met with concern and is tamped down under the guise of my mental wellbeing. How can I live a balanced life when my natural urges are read as a warning sign?

A few months after being diagnosed and medicated, I experienced a hypomanic episode where I drank too much, took stimulants, slept too little, and had sex with a handful of strangers – most of these factors commingling in one way or another.

Manic relapses are not ideal for someone who is medicated for bipolar, but they are common, particularly during the phase of medication review or change.

During the process of being diagnosed, I’d grown used to all the medical professionals in my life asking about my sexual activity: Was I sexually active? Did I use protection? How many partners did I currently have? Did I ever sleep with people I didn’t know at all?

After this particular manic episode, however, my psychiatrist’s tone shifted. Perhaps it was because I was medicated and, ideally, should not be experiencing this kind of mania anymore, or perhaps his mask slipped and I peeked at the bias and judgement behind.

He asked all the usual questions – how many, how often, how, what, why, who, did you use protection? – and I answered lazily, tired after a few weeks of being in a high, hypomanic state, or perhaps tired of the constant barrage of questions about my private life.

“Yes, a condom,” I answered to the question of protection, “but I really wouldn’t have cared if he didn’t use one.”

My psychiatrist’s eyebrows shot up and he sat back in his seat.

“Well, it’s very good he did. It would be the worst thing for someone like you to get pregnant.”

The session moved on, but I kept turning the comment over in my mind: someone like me, someone like me.

I struggled to know what he might mean by this. My mind raced with shame, anger and the internalised stigma and ableism of being mentally ill. Even now, I keep coming back to this comment, his relief at my use of protection, and his opinion that I have a disorder and so I am not fit to have children – that it would be the “worst thing”.

Stigma against mental illness is rampant, perhaps even more so in the psychiatric system. It makes sense, I suppose, that the place that offers up these labels for you to wear would use them against you so readily.

As a mental health patient, you are constantly analysed and interrogated, the symptoms that make up your life investigated to draw conclusions. But often this does not offer many answers for how exactly you might live in the world – in reality – with your condition in tow.

It doesn’t offer any solutions for how to broach the subject of having a chronic condition that sometimes alters your moods or how you behave to someone you might want to date. It certainly doesn’t offer any guidance on how to surreptitiously take seven different tablets at a specific time when you’re in the middle of a hot date.

A mental health condition does not often integrate well with life.

Love and sex are things that ebb and flow with my moods. The lows bring self-doubt, hatred and low self-esteem. The highs bring an insatiable hunger for any kind of stimulation, a thirst for contact and connection.

Being medicated dulls this intense desire for connection, but the feeling is still there. The lingering sensation of hypomania and desire reminds me that I’m still here, in body if not soul.

Either side of bipolar is not who I want to be, or appear as, especially when it comes to dating. Instead, I want the unattainable in-between. I want to be present, not manic or depressed.

I imagine a love life that is compatible with my bipolar. I want to get to a place where I can feel confident in all the things that come with dating, whether it’s a one-night stand or a long-lasting relationship. I want to be ‘in it’ fully, but I know how much work that will take me internally.

I worry constantly about disclosing my condition to anyone I date: When is the right time? What will they think of me after I tell them? How do I show them that it won’t really change what we have?

I try desperately to combat the stigma I hold for myself, so I might steel myself for any stigma shown by others. This adds another degree of anxiety and anticipation in a romantic landscape already fraught with self-doubt and self-judgement.

I desperately want to show the best side of me, but when you have so many sides, it’s hard to know which one will appear on any given day.

Mental illness is not often compatible with love. And mad women rarely get mistaken for the girl next door.