Author Archives: Blessings Bob Matongo

This is the only thing, from now on, I’ll believe about love.

Love is a matter of fortune, otherwise it’s not love.

When we’re in love, either in form of friendship or romance, I can’t see any other way, apart from we’re just in a fortunate situation. A change of situation can render us unfortunate. I’ve come to this conclusion from my own experience.

I don’t think that loneliness is entirely our fault; the environment plays a part to it as well. I remember being in my hometown where I didn’t have any friends I was genuinely comfortable with. I remember being so lonely. It’s so easy to think we’re the problem when sometimes we just find ourselves in foreign environments.

All my life I laboured to get love. I’ve listened and watched thousands of intellectuals give their thoughts about girls (or boys), friendship and everything social. In my opinion, all I can say is that that’s the worst advice you could get from someone.

As I’ve talked to different people, I’ve discovered that some people I get on with well (there’s nothing I manufactured to get that), and some people are just… people I talk to. And it was those people that I was trying to get their attention because of a lack of understanding of how human interaction worked. Now, I’m no psychologist or whatever, but I can speak from my experience what I’ve come to believe about the way I should handle my social life.

1. Don’t push too much…don’t push at all

It was during my highschool years when I would make acquaintance with different people. Some people I would get on with very well, and some we wouldn’t really have anything to talk about. I would make it a very great effort to get on with these people I wasn’t really compatible with. What resulted was resentment. These people would be put off by my efforts.

There’s something about being in a conversation in which the participants (or one of them) are trying to please the other. Everything feels forced, and so people generally try to avoid such conversation. I’ll share another story on this:

In my ninth grade, I got into a battle for a girl with one of my friends. Apparently, at that age, it was a sign of dominance to be the guy who snatches the girl from another guy (as is preached by many gurus and ‘intellectuals’ online). So, my friend found me talking to some girl I’d just met, and immediately started to ‘try’ to lure her away from me. I didn’t want to go down without a fight. You can fill in the rest of information.

2. Talk to a lot of people, but don’t chat with all of them.

One thing I’ve learned to do is to be visible to a lot of people. To let them know I’m there, breathing. If I’m in a group of some sort I can talk to everyone as to be comfortable with them, but I don’t even know more than half of them on a personal level. And I don’t try to do that. I just so happened to effortlessly get close to some people and not-so-close to others. Some people have different ‘vibes’ from me, and that’s totally okay. Again, if we’re in a group, we still hang out and play with each other but don’t really have that much conversation with them. Not all connection is made through conversation, but you should be familiar with them at minimum.

3. You don’t have to do ANYTHING!

Every type of person can have friends, despite their frailties (unless under extreme cases—of which if you’re reading this then you’re not under those cases). All you have to do is talk. Just talk. No need to be alpha and all that totally bullshit. Just talk. Talk to different people. Talk to them a couple of times, and then stuck with those that come naturally to you as friends. It’s all a natural process, I tell you.

If you’re awkward or shy, don’t worry about that. You’re not the only one. Don’t even think about changing it. In my opinion, it’s all bullshit. Go out there and talk to different people. You’ll find A LOT of them awkward and shy and insecure just like you. And guess what? They might be your friends…or maybe not. But getting exposed to such people will make you realize that you’re not such a piece of shit. We’re all pieces of the same shit together. And you’ll become less judgemental about others as well as yourself. And you’ll begin to do everyone else a favor and stop thinking everyone is against.

Take this advice. Try it. And see what happens.

Also I would love to know your stories (if any) about how you’ve managed to get out of your head and got the fuck out there.

Thank you for reading.

Dealing with depression: last blogpost.

This is the last blog post I’ll do, and if I decide to do anything else, it’ll be on another blog. In this post I’ll share little snippets of memory my two and a half year depression (leading to the creation of this blog), and I’ll also share what I’ve learned from my irregular blogging (about blogging), and finally my biggest lesson from everything and why I’ve decided I no longer have more to put on this blog. My hope is that you’ll learn something from this.

My story about depression.

In February, 2020 (I remember the month because I used to keep a journal), I got into a fight with my parents. That argument was terrible. My mum wanted to give me a lecture about something I didn’t do. And it was an uncomfortable conversation about a very sensitive topic that I wasn’t willing to just sit and listen to her talking about it. I think I would have listened if I was involved, but I wasn’t and so I expressed my sensitivity to the topic without consideration about her own feelings. And my emotional wellbeing was all downhill from there on.

At the time of the argument, I was from graduating high-school. I had been excited to spend some time off school up until that moment. Arguing with my parents had never been something I had ever done in my life. During the fight, I pointed out an event in my childhood in which I felt needed some apology from them. To be frank, I was as surprised as they were to find that I was still haunted by this humiliating and alienating moment in my life. My parents refused to acknowledge that, and to add more wood to the fire, they said some pretty negative words. Let’s face it, I did, too. But no one can keep a grudge better than me.

What followed was guilt and shame and denial. I had some nightmares and some dark suicidal thoughts. I felt judged, as I always had felt in my life, and I was no longer as free to live under the same rules as my parents. I judged myself too much as well. Whatever move I made to make things better for myself and other people felt insufficient. I remember one day I kissed my mother on the forehead. Hours later I was thinking that maybe she faked her ‘thank you’ when I did so. I thought I was a piece of shit, and that premise ran through my mind my whole stay at home. And then I met self-improvement.

It wasn’t working

I don’t want to say anything bad about self-improvement, but I do have some problems with it. I believe that self-improvement helps countless people around the world, but when I look at things the way they were, I was better off not ‘self-improving.’ (I’ll explain later in this post.)

I reduced hanging out with my friends. I thought more and more. I watched videos about how not to care about what people said and how to walk like a burly chimpanzee. And I would implement all this, but none of it made the pain I was feeling inside go away. I’d thought of dying a few times, but I did much to avoid thinking such thoughts. And so I indulged in more and more self-improvement, and I was slowly cutting myself off from the world the more I thought I needed to work on myself. I wanted to stop being the piece of shit I was and then I could go out the world, but of course that day never came. I saw what was happening to me, and so I thought I needed to get some fresh air.

I had to get out somehow.

And so I did. But there was a big problem…

I had become more emotionally fragile. I was failing to date the girls I wanted to date and I had this pressure of feeling like I had to prove to people that i wasn’t a piece of shit after all.

One day I was walking on a wide path and a thin, non-threatening-looking guy was walking in front of me toward the opposite direction. I don’t what got into me but I bumped him on the shoulder for reason apart from the fact that I was insecure.

Let the blog begin.

A few scenarios later I began this blog. I was yearning for something to keep me busy and a blog seemed reasonable. I had nothing to blog about except whatever I had been listening to in those motivational videos and books. A few posts later I started to find my rhythm. And the next posts I would make would be more like little reminders to myself, and those posts are the best performing posts on this blog to this day. My guess is that this blog exists for the sole purpose of those posts. Whatever post I made after those posts seemed to deviate from why I started this blog.

I don’t think that this blog was meant to help me mentally, but it sure paints a clear picture of what i was trying to achieve in my personal life.

The bright side of it all.

My story of depression and finding passion for this blog and then losing it has been more like a hero’s journey in my life. I set out to become less of a piece of shit, picked some tools on the way, and then came back having realized that I was never a piece of shit after all.

I learned to meditate, not for the health benefits (those are cool, too) but for the sole purpose that meditation that the Buddhists and Zen-meditators invented it for.

I learned to write better than i used to.

I’ve become less and less judgmental about certain types of people I’d once never really liked.

And I’ve also learned that you can do well for your mental health without advice coming in from the world into every hole around your body. Going back to the problem about self-help; if there’s anything I’ve learned about dealing with negative thinking, it’s this:

More thinking rarely helps. One thing about depression (my kind of depression) is that you keep thinking negative thoughts, and you make mountains upon mountains out of small things. And if you treat it like a problem (the depression) it will be bigger. If I’d remained hurt and offended for a few days, and if I’d just fought to shrug off any negative force and not treat it like a big deal. I’m sure that I wouldn’t have gone to the places I went in my head. I’m sure because this is how I’ve been recovering now for almost a month. I’m now going into social places and acting out what I really feel like acting out, and then when I leave those places I’m forgetting about what happened. I shrug off any thought that creeps in afterward. What has happened is that now I’m finding my rhythm. and it’s coming because I’m no longer taking things too seriously now. And the basis of this blog has been falling apart because of that. And so I think it’s best that I leave it at this.

The result of all this

It will be amazing to check these posts out in four years time and see them with different pairs of eyes, but of now I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Depression had given me some sense of meaning, but my reality has changed since I started recovering. it’s like my brain hit reset and now I’m finding out that some things that I thought I wanted to do aren’t really ”it”. So I’m going to give myself a break from all of this now.

I want to focus on family, friendship, having fun, and my studies for now. I want to be my age for now, at least even for half the year, and maybe then I will pause and think about what I want to do next. The thing about doing this type of work is that it wears you out somehow. And I’m a recovering anxious, self-loathing, self-judgmental person. I want to give myself breathing space.

I’m wishing all of you the best in this. From all of my heart, friends:

stay safe 🙂