Living with Teenage-Hormonal-Fluctuation-Syndrome; or, How Petting Kitties and Walking Puppies Will Help Me Overcome THFS

Wow - I've actually been away for awhile; not away, away - of course, god knows I don't have the money to go "away, away" - but away from the blog-o-sphere.  It's not that I didn't have anything to say - I always have something to say - or not even that I couldn't think of interesting topics.  The cold, hard reality is that I didn't have the bloody motivation to turn on my damn computer and organize my thoughts into some form of coherency.  You see, I live in waves - waves of total lack of motivation and therefore complete inaction and stagnation alternating with waves of hyper-motivation, overachieving and uber-giddiness due to my inability to sleep because I'm too busy saving the world and making it prettier at the same time.  I know what you're thinking, I had doctors question whether or not I had bipolar as well, but after years of therapy, they discovered it was actually something much more terrifying: teenage-hormonal-fluctuation-syndrome.   This is, apparently, an unfortunate misnomer, as teenage-hormonal-fluctuation-syndrome, or THFS, is not confined to the teenaged-years of life.  No, oh no my illustrious friends and faithful followers, THFS has continued to haunt me well into my adult life and shows no sign of letting up. 

I do believe I have found a major trigger for THFS, however: lack of purpose.  Back in the good ol' days - you know, about 5 months ago, when I still had a job! - my life was filled with purpose and, therefore, my THFS was thoroughly under control.  I had a reason to get out of bed and leave the house; by the end of the day I was so emotionally and physically exhausted that THFS simply didn't have the energy to rear it's ugly head.  Currently my great get-out-of-bed motivators are: "the sooner you get up the sooner they will stop meowing in your face and stepping on your overly-full bladder," and  "I think I'm kinda hungry."  My reasons for getting dressed and leaving the house consist of needing to transfer more money from savings into checking and the book I reserved at the library is finally in; although the transferring money thing happens a hell of a lot more often than I like to think about, neither event is frequent enough to get me out of the house more than once a week.  So, besides the occasional 4-hour online application that decides to not save even though I hit the save button a million and a half times and the subsequent 2 hours spent on the phone with various IT departments trying to recover the application and procure the supplemental materials needed for a 19-hour/week job that I probably won't get anyway, I have very little purpose in my life currently.  Sure, I'm doing art again, which is actually really exciting, but there are only so many hours out of the day that you can individually place tiny beads before you go insane.  Naturally, in my current situation, I am dealing with frustrating waves of THFS on a daily basis!  I decided last week that this must be rectified, and then lost of the motivation to do anything about it until today!  Yay for the hyper-motivated, overachieving, uber-giddiness wave!  

So, purpose.  How does one create purpose in their life when they have an entire year to kill before they go back to school?  I see a couple of possibilities.  One, get ready for school.  I registered for my GRE.  It will be in late October so I have time to study but if I suck it up I can re-take it in November before my first applications are due in December, and I have a GRE study book on reserve at the library.  I've also inputed all the application procedures and dates in a spread sheet with projected "done by" dates.  I haven't actually started working on any of the applications or studying for the GRE, but it's all ready to go!  This "purpose" doesn't actually get me out of the house, however, which is why I've come up with purpose number two: animals.  I really like animals ... a lot; I don't, however, need more animals at home.  The best solution to my petting-cute-puppies-kitties-and-bunnies need while not bringing them home to live with me seems to be volunteering at an animal shelter!  I've downloaded the application and signed up for the volunteer training - also in October, as that was their earliest available date.  I've indicated an interest in dog-walking, kitty-petting and small-animal-socializing.  I am actually ridiculously excited about this!  Thirdly, I've decided that I need a solid medium-term goal for myself as school is ultimately long-term and animal volunteer will be accomplished in the short-term.  Official medium-term goal and third giving-purpose-to-my-unemployed-self is: hiking the Oregon section of the Pacific Crest Trail.  Now, I know I've mentioned this before, but it's a little more developed in my head.  Next summer, mid-July to mid-August, I will be hiking 460-ish miles across the state of Oregon.  Until that time, I will also be blogging about my training: where we hike, product reviews, difficulties and successes ... (oh yes my dear friends, for those of you who simply can't enough of reading about my life to make you feel better about yours, you will soon have a NEW outlet!  I'm creating a new blog to chronicle my training!  I will post the link as soon as it's created!)  This last one seemed like a good mid-term goal that will also force me outside (as you can't train very well inside the house, or more specifically you can, but your neighbors will look at you funny when you go up and down the stairs to the basement 150 times with a 40 pack on your back ... I don't actually know this from experience, but I'm guessing it's probably true) and give me something to do on a semi-regular basis in the form of updating my blog.  Don't worry though, this blog isn't going away; I definitely still need a place to rant, rave and expose all my embarassing social faux pas. 

So there you have it: my reason for being so silent the last few weeks, and my new ambitious plan to overcome the all-but-completely-debilitating, if misnomered, condition of teenage-hormonal-fluctuation-syndrome.