Malibongwe Sithelo
3 min readAug 19, 2021

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Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

Blaming yourself all the time

It doesn’t serve the world to keep blaming yourself every time something bad happens to you. It’s a fact that many are times you try to be good and all bad things keep coming. The death of your loved ones meanwhile murderers walk freely in our societies doesn’t mean you are cursed. Quit blaming yourself when you have tried several times to make someone understand how much you love him or her but instead, it seems all effortless. If someone finds a speck in your eye and gets turned off on the first date, it’s not your fault. Perfectionists date each other to make a beautiful world look miserable.

We are fed weird stuff by motivational speakers that whatever happens to you, you have attracted it. It is not running away from responsibilities to never take the blame all the time when every friendship seems to be milking you out dry. Other people in your life came to take and rip you off on purpose. There are some who like you the way you are, average. Comparing yourself with others will make you bitter over their successes as you are still way behind. It doesn’t always mean you haven’t put much effort into your ambitions. It is like running a marathon with elite runners whose main source of income is running. Trying to compare yourself and blame laziness on yourself is not going make you fast to win the first prize. While busy in the office, they are in the mountains train, in the field doing speed.

Whatever will go wrong will always do. When something bad already happens it is up to us to learn to avoid and or minimize the risks in the future. I have failed one relationship particularly only because I was always hiding behind busy. Working hard and the hustlers call it hustling. I really regret neglecting that woman over working hard. I do not blame myself for losing the relationship because I only realized later it was the cause. It was a lesson learned, the strange way and hard. Maybe I should have used wisdom to save our relationship of which poverty was the only thing I was striving against to never fall into it again. Times are different. It is not to be biased. But understanding times as well brings wisdom.

If you’ve been raped in the past, I don’t think you can blame yourself over uncontrollable characters in our societies. I have heard heartless preachers claiming a raped woman must also consider their dressing code. Absurd. You hear far less anything against the perpetrator. An unsafe community is not all your fault to be robbed. I often hear self-help books followers quoting if you can’t change your environment or situation change yourself. I get that, but how do you change yourself when you are discriminated against by your gender, race, and faith? What if your rights have been undermined?

Blaming yourself for having met your ex is not going to change the fact that at first you were blinded by love. It is part of life. Feelings were high about him/her. So do you blame yourself for something that didn’t work? It is not always the case that you made wrong choices. You were in love. Love is a beautiful thing and people change. Get used to that, but blaming yourself is not ideal.

You are part of the problem, fact. How do we all get out of the mess? The answer to that will determine the solution. Whatever happened, turned out to be a mess. Accept it. This is not to condone blame-shifting. Neither running away from responsibilities but also taking aback before accepting the mess. Seek not someone to blame. Leave no stone unturned to take some blames so that you won’t repeat the same mistake. You might find out it’s not always you making bad choices.

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Malibongwe Sithelo

I'm a freelance writer, a runner and a public servant in South Africa. I write about everyday life experiences.