I’ve tried writing this post a few times, and it always sounds dumb. Like excessive navel-gazing. So I’m going to just simplify it.

Someone I am very close to is going through a period of, for lack of a better term, self-discovery. This got me thinking. Skateboarders often talk about how becoming a skater changed their lives. I have said the same kind of things over the years. Certainly when I “became a skater” at age 11 the trajectory of my life changed a lot.

But did I really “become” a skater then or had I always been, and at that point I just found the skateboard?

I think maybe the skateboard just kind of revealed who I was inside, and gave me the means of self-expression that made sense to me. I became a skater, and so many other parts of my life kind of fell into place. The way I made sense of the world. Where the Venn diagram of skateboarding intersects those of alternative music, scholarship, art, fashion, etc – that is where things got interesting. That’s where I met my wife.

Anyway, here’s my current board. It’s better than the one I started with all those years ago, but essentially the same thing. It’s crazy how such a simple thing can impact someone so much. But it happens to other people with other things. Someone picks up a book and that person is a natural scholar. A pen – a writer. On and on.