How to insert a blogroll and enable comments on portfolio items

Hello!
I’m not very savvy with wordpress yet, so bear with me!
I’ve recently installed a new theme and while it’s ‘photography’, I’m using it like a blog, however where it looked like there were ‘posts’, they’re labelled ‘portfolio’ and won’t allow commenting- is there a way I can either put posts there instead of portfolio items, or enable commenting and sharing as though it were a post?

Then I thought I could post all the recent posts there are portfolio items and have the older ones in a ‘blog archive’.

Also, not sure how to get my blogroll up and running as it asks for links to a page?? Not sure how to get all the thumbnails into a page to link it to.

Sorry if it’s not too clear, like many here I’m not sure what it is that I don’t know!
The website is https://www.thetechgypsy.com and I’m running awesome photography theme.

Thank you!

Robyn