Yo, sapp! Please, sil vous plait, ejo, biko, delete any guy that types like this to you in greeting, if he can’t type good morning/afternoon/evening, he’s not deserving of your Whatsapp or BBM or Twitter DM, sage words from Gloria lol and that concludes my rant.
Hi everyone, I’m back again like Don Jazzy (don’t you roll your eyes at me), this time I’m going to talk about the blues, I always thought I’d be an expert on the subject seeing as I get it a lot but I actually got hung a lot of times when I was writing this which is quite rare for me but then I still managed to get something down on paper so the boss wouldn’t gimme the sack, yay me! Now let’s get down to it, shall we? I’m gonna construct a few scenarios for you, if you don’t relate to any of them… I don’t like you; you’ll know why when you continue reading:
- Have you ever woken up tired? You just want to go back to bed and lay under the covers, you’re begging God to take the sun back so you don’t have to get up and face your thoughts or the day’s challenges, when you finally get up, everyone around you seem so chirpy, and you wonder what they’ve got to be happy about, you feel like bursting their bubble so they can be as sad as you (Machiavelli of life).
- Have you woken up on the good side actually, but halfway through your day, you’re contemplating suicide (humorously, I hope)? Those lecturers seem like they’ve managed to get infected by one of the Beelzebub demons Sam and Dean are always casting out in Supernatural (I love that series, yeah I’m weird, deal with it!) and it’s like they’re all out to get you, and your mind just goes back to that place it had no business going…
- Or have you had a really good day, I mean a day where all you’ve done is laugh at jokes, gone out with friends, shopped on credit (just look at you…smh) and you’ve done everything right but because he didn’t call, something still feels incomplete about that day…
From my very parochial view, I think most people with flighty thought processes are also prone to mood swings on the downside, you’d probably never know because they’re the most humorous people you’ll ever meet. I’m not talking about clinical depression, I’m no expert on that and if you feel you have that, I’d advise you see a psychiatrist, what I’m rambling on about are mood swings, most of the time, there’s a precipitate for mood swings, tiredness, hunger, bae or the seemingly lack of one (whichever applies to you *tongue-in-cheek*), being scolded by whoever etcetera. But if you’re being true to yourself, that mood you’re in was brought on by something and maybe like me, you don’t want to look at it too closely because looking at it too closely brings out stronger emotions – pleasant or unpleasant – than you’re comfortable with so you put it in a nice little box in one dusty corner at the back of your mind and proceed to ignore it but try as you might, you can’t forget about it ‘cause it will not allow you to, hence, some of it still seeps through the tiny holes in that box and comes out as your mood swing. Please feel free to counter my theory with one of yours if you so desire. So what do you do when the blues come after the reggae?
I’m a Christian (though I haven’t been inside the four walls of a church building in a while, my conscience and it’s needle though *sigh*) and in my religion there’s this thing we refer to as the Fruits of the Spirit, there are eight of them I think, one of them being self control and that my friend, is what you and I seem to have a poor grasp on. Mind you, when I say self control, I don’t mean the escapism we practice where we know what’s bothering us but then we pretend to ourselves that it’s not.
Self control is a much needed but very scarce virtue in today’s world if I do say so myself, it’s the ability to curb, and not just actively ignore, excesses. Self control is much more than not eating too much, sleeping too much, talking too much and so on, if you can do all those things too much or too little, how come you can’t feel too much or too little?
I’ll give you an example, as the precocious child I was, I used to love one song being played on the TV as an intro to the evening news, and one day, I decided to dance on the centre table so I climbed it. As if that wasn’t enough, I started jumping on it, I took a misstep, fell and sprained my arm, needless to say, I was in pain for few weeks after that and it was only because of that pain that I wasn’t punished by my daddy; had I had the knowledge to apply a little cautiousness to my happiness maybe I wouldn’t have this memory.
Questions to ask about that thought or feeling predisposing you to having foul moods:
- Is it something you can do something about? .e.g.
The guy you’re so in love with who doesn’t feel the same way about you, maybe if you were a little cautious in love you’d see why it makes sense to leave him be instead of making yourself sad all the time when he doesn’t meet your expectations.
Those so-called acquaintances that seemingly cannot do anything right, a little cautiousness with your ability to find microscopic faults as well as the knowledge that maybe the problem lies with your intolerance and snobbery rather than their ineptitude may do well for your incessant anger
- Is it beyond your control? .e.g.
If you learn to accept the fact that your choleric lecturer will want to hold a tutorial by 7.a.m before an 8.a.m ward round, maybe you’ll be as chirpy as the rest of the class since y’all are basically in the same boat (learn to miss some too once in a while, body no be firewood my brothers and sisters in da lord. Disclaimer: follow this advice at your own peril)
Sometimes, a little self control may be what you need to lighten the weight of the world that’s making you the hunchback of Notredam and giving you drooping shoulders most of the time. Cheer up, the whole world is falling apart (ok, maybe that’s a little too dark but you get my point), till next week, auf Wiedersehen.
Gloria.
