You can also read my interviews with the writers Ann Leary (“Rallying to Keep the Game Alive”), Deborah Copaken (“When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist”) and Julie Margaret Hogben (“When the Doorman Is Your Main Man”), whose essays also inspired episodes.

Daniel Jones: Your story is about how, for so long, you completely hid the fact that you were bipolar. Then you wrote about it for Modern Love, wrote a best-selling book about it, and now it’s an episode of the Modern Love series, revealing you to even more people all around the world. How scared were you in the first place about going public with this?

Terri Cheney: I was terrified. Other than my doctors, very few people knew what was going on with me. I would just disappear from the world so nobody saw. And at work , I was productive and on top of my game. I was able to make up all the work that I had fallen behind on, and it had been the same with school. But I was continuously terrified that someone would find out and I would get fired or no one would ever love me.

And what happened after the essay came out?

It was astonishing. So many people contacted me. A lot by people who identified with me, but also people asking me to do speaking engagements. I also got a marriage proposal.

Really?

Yeah, some guy who’d read the Modern Love column and thought I deserved love.

By email or some other way?