A hormonal outburst.

For the last year, maybe eighteen months, I've been suffering with mood swings. Or at least, until I started blogging, I thought I had.

After Christmas 2009, I realised that my moods varied greatly from week to week and I managed to track them back to realise the connection to my cycle and the days I went on/off the pill. I was already having relationship problems with my then-boyfriend, and when I spent one week of every month crying and another shouting at anyone and everything like a crazed mad woman, I realised this wasn't going to help. So I trotted off to my doctors, presented the evidence and she swapped me to another type of pill.

Type in 'hormonal woman' to google image search et voila... depicted.

By this point it was March, and my relationship with my then-boyfriend was hanging by a thread so I hoped the change would help. It did not, and actually, my new pill made me even more insane and I became impossible to live with. I look back now at some of my demands and some of the fights we had and I can't believe I was ever like that, and whilst nothing justifies the way he finished things, I'm surprised we made it to April before he kicked me out, leaving me homeless and broke in every sense of the word.

When I realised that my emotions were being partly-fuelled by the pill again, I took myself off it and had a very nice, placated 5 months before my need for a longer term contraceptive took me back to the doctor. I now have an IUD coil fitted, which works on many of the same hormones but at a much reduced rate and rather than breaking every month, it provides a consistent flow. And yet I still seemed to suffer the same mood swings from Christmas onwards, going from illogical to teary-eyed to angry beast within days, and I suffered all the other effects of a hormone 'wobble' as my (obviously male) doctor described them, such as headaches and spots.

But now, after having split with my boyfriend three months ago and having only had one 'wobble' since, I've realised the factor was not my hormones. It was my relationship, or rather, relationships. The mood swings being caused by them, the headaches and spots from the stress of being unhappy in my situation... it all adds up, and it was only when I had my first mood swing in months on Thursday that I realised what actually caused my flare-ups. And needless to say, it has nothing to do with my hormone levels, but rather the boyfriend-induced stress levels. The calmest I've been in months have been the times I've felt truly free of BS (boyfriend stress, which to be honest could readily be exchanged with 'bullshit' and the effect would be the same) and as quickly as my BS came on Thursday, I ditched the cause from my life and magically I'm fine again.

I suppose there could be a cause-and-effect debate here, but regardless, it seems that the calmer I keep my life and the more I focus on myself rather than running my life for someone else, the clearer life seems. And it's a nice realisation, that actually I am in control of this. And hopefully now I know, it will lead to a better screening process in the future and the early warning signs of BS will be much more, often explosively, apparent.

As if I needed another reason to abstain from men in the next year or so - I have much better things to be doing, much greater things to achieve, and a much greater level of stability to reach than I ever could, evidently, with a man in tow.

So sorry guys, I'm officially off the market, even if this tale of a truly crazy woman didn't put you off...