Asexual, Aromantic, Mentally Ill and Chronically Misread

I thought I was badly written for a huge part of my life. Not tragic, not dramatic, but misaligned with the plot. People around me dated, fell in love, broke up, tried again. Desire seemed to arrive naturally for them, like a romance novel: inevitable and unquestioned. Meanwhile, sex felt frightening to me, and dating demanded acting in a play whose script I had memorized but never understood. I told myself it would change with time, with experience, with the right person – the usual script.

Spoiler: it never did.

I learned the word asexual first. It came like a marginal note in the corner of a page I had reread a hundred times. Through the writing and openness of people like Alice Oseman, I saw a possibility I hadn’t allowed myself: that nothing was wrong, that I wasn’t delayed or damaged, that my lack of sexual attraction was not a problem to solve. Suddenly, there was language for something I had always lived, and it didn’t pathologize me.

But I still believed in romance. I thought: asexual, yes, but I must still be meant for that one person, right? Disney promised. So I tried and dated, explained my asexuality, and gave things chances. And still, something resisted. Only when I started reading more broadly about different kinds of bonds and decentralizing romance, about how deeply romance-centered our culture is, did I begin to understand that what I wanted was not romance at all.

I am a loving person. I form deep, committed friendships. I crave emotional and intellectual intimacy. I can admire people the way I admire a painting or an intriguing book cover, aesthetically, intellectually, with curiosity and warmth. This kind of looking isn’t pursuit but attention without possession, closeness without claim, something our language rarely makes room for.

But the gravitational pull everyone described, the merging of lives around a romantic feeling, did not happen. And I certainly didn’t want anyone in my bed. What I wanted was connection, and society taught me I could only truly find it in romance.

What finally shifted was not a new feeling, but a new question: Why am I forcing myself into something that distresses me?

A Second Layer of the Story

I live with bipolar II disorder, sometimes with ultra-rapid cycling. My inner climate shifts fast. Depressive episodes are heavy, airless spaces. Despair seeps into my limbs, I have thoughts of not wanting to continue because everything feels unbearably hard. Hypomania brings too much energy, but sharp, irritable, overstimulated energy; it means sleeplessness, a mind running faster than my capacity to inhabit it, impulses that outpace judgment. Mixed episodes feel like having the energy of hypomania but the hopelessness of depression at the same time – worst of both worlds.

And yet, through all of it, I feel like myself.

That is almost the cruelest part. When I am irritable, when I mess something up, when I am too much or not enough, I cannot step aside and say, “That wasn’t me, it was my illness.” It is me, only intensified, thinned out, flooded, or drained. Bipolar disorder changes the pressure system of my emotions, not the foundation.

Of course, it doesn’t make me hypersexual in hypomania, as stereotypes suggest, nor does it switch on romantic longing in depression. My orientation, i.e., my lack of sexual and romantic attraction, remains steady. What changes is how much I can bear, how much I need support, how afraid I am that I am too much or not enough for the people I love.

If anything, being aroace shapes how bipolar disorder plays out in my life. I don’t have romantic fallouts during episodes. My loneliness is different, partly chosen, partly imposed by a world that assumes everyone is moving in pairs. There is a difference between solitude that fits you and solitude that the world leaves you with. I live with both. I am alone, but not loveless. I have support, but still feel sometimes isolated by design.

These are not separate books on the same shelf. They are words printed on the same paper, between the same two covers.

When Others Try to Rewrite You

The trouble with living at intersections is that people dislike multi-genre stories. They want a single explanation, a dominant theme. So when people learn I am bipolar and aroace, many reach for the same move: cut one to explain the other.

“Maybe it’s just the illness.”

“Loss of desire can be a symptom.”

“Once you’re more stable, you might feel differently.”

“Are you sure it’s not the medication?”

What hurts most is not the suggestion itself, but what’s underneath: the assumption that I am an unreliable narrator of my own life.

As a lifelong reader, I know this voice whose account cannot be trusted, whose perceptions are distorted, whose story must be corrected from the outside – and I absolutely love it in literature. Mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, already carries that suspicion. Emotions are too big or too flat; reactions are too sharp; judgments are questioned. Add asexuality and aromanticism, and some people decide my entire interior world is a misinterpretation.

Ironically, living with a shifting mind has made me more attentive to my interior life, not less. I have had to learn the ebb and flow of my emotions with precision just to stay afloat. If anything, that has made me a more careful narrator, not an unreliable one.

In this hierarchy of explanations, pathology outranks identity. A diagnosis is treated as more “real” than self-knowledge. It is more comfortable for some to believe that my way of relating to the world is a chemical imbalance rather than a valid variation of being human. The cultural script says romance is a universal, necessary, and superior form of connection. And we rarely question it, even though it distorts countless lives. Norms are things considered neutral simply because more people believe them, not because they are more natural or real.

So I am asked, implicitly and explicitly, to defend who I am. To prove that I am not “missing out on real life.” To reassure others that I have considered every alternative explanation, as if I have not lived inside this body and mind my entire life. It is exhausting, and not because I doubt myself, but because I am tired of explaining my existence.

Romance as the Default Plot

This erasure doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We live in a culture that treats romantic partnership as the main storyline of adulthood, the relationship that must carry emotional, practical, and existential weight. Everything else, like friendships, chosen family, and community, becomes a subplot.

From the outside, my life can look like absence: no partner, no dating, no pursuit of “the one.” But from the inside, it is full of other bonds, other intensities, other forms of devotion. I would do anything for my friends. I build deep, durable connections; they just aren’t romantic.

Sometimes I am angry at this world. Not only because it leaves out people like me and makes living alone economically punishing, but also because it places impossible pressure on romantic partners to be everything: lover, best friend, emotional support system, social unit, life plan. 

The hybridity of identities, relationships, and ways of being is flattened into a single acceptable shape.

My life does not follow that plot; it never did. It is not my failure, but the world’s failure of imagination.

Claiming My Narrative

Being asexual, aromantic, and bipolar is not a contradiction to resolve. It is a layered text, margins full, meanings overlapping.

Yes, my moods shift like unstable weather, my nervous system sometimes burns too bright or goes dim, and I don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction. These truths coexist without hierarchy. One doesn’t invalidate the other.

It isn’t a symptom pretending to be an identity. I’m a person whose interior life does not fit the dominant narrative. This doesn’t make me an unreliable narrator. I am the author.