One can possible ask what’s the worst that can happen with boredom? Well, a lot can happen and you can never say never cos that was my case with boredom.
I had a very scary experience with boredom that I could tell you I know what it sounds and feels like. Some years ago I relocated to a remote part of Rivers state in Nigeria for an assignment with the people I work it. It a remote place some a bit not too civilized and having electricity was a big problem.
We could stay for months and we haven’t seen light. I had three power banks to use at my disposal and thats to show you the extent the light issue was. I take turns charging the powerbanks just so as to not be offline.
Here I had no friends and the people I was working with were way to below to be actual
Friends. It was more of a mentor mentee relationship I had with them. They were all looking up to me and had nothing outside that to offer me.
Well, I thought and knew that I knew how to manage loneliness or so I thought but I was lonely and bored to death. When I was wasn’t working cos I don’t work all the time, I’d stay indoors. No place to visit or go to cos ofcourse I am in the village. And even I wanted to explore a little, I was scared of debit alerts. Yea, cos leaving the confines of the house was invariably a debit alert and it wasn’t as if money was everywhere.
Well, I was so lonely and bored that I became so scared. One of those days, I could literally feel loneliness and boredom seeping through the walls of the self contain room that I lived in. I was startled. I still remember those days. It felt like the room was closing in on me literally.
One of those days, I took a long walk. I just got dressed after suffocating inside the room. Got up and started walking on the village streets. I had no money so I had to just walk. Where was I walking to, I didn’t know, I just kept walking. After an hour of walking, I turned back and walked back home to my boring and lonely life. My legs and feet ached so badly.
Then out of the blues came the idea to go join a dating site. Well, what can boredom not do? I goggled on dating site and joined the one they said was a Christian dating site. Well, I filled out my details and just when I thought the boredom was about to be broken, I noticed the site was hungry for money.
Without paying, you won’t get much out of it. Because I was in a village in River state, the place I could use as the nearest city was Portharcout and then I met another guy from Portharcourt. We exchange contacts and started talking. We was way younger than me but what boredom causes is a lot.
Men and brethren did you know that this fellow was in that same village with me. Hahaha. We both had to use Portharcout as nearest city to register our location. That was so absurd. And then news flash is that he was as broke as I am. I guess he was looking for rich lover hahaha. Long and short of the matter is that he never insinuated we see.
He perfectly avoided any such conversations. Till date he’s still in my contact list but we never saw until I left that place and we don’t talk. And then came another drama of meeting another broke 53 year old man asking me to marry him. It was at this point that I knew my time was over. I couldn’t even deactivate the account. I just changed my profile picture to a glass of juice. Deleted my details and said byes to the dating site.
Well, boredom still comes once in a while but I’ve learnt to balance it with doing the things I love like writing, reading and sometimes I see movies just to keep myself busy. Boredom can make you do the worst so we just have to be self aware. In my case it was from boredom to dating site.