hey we're not getting any younger

Thinking back on childhood, there's a couple of regrets I have in the things I chose to pursue. Interests I squashed because of external factors that now seem silly. In basketball, I regret allowing nerves to dominate my performance in games and not doing more to live up to the potential I knew I had, but never let come to fruition. Creatively, I regret not doing more with photography and filmmaking during the times when cinematography was really all I could think about. I was held back by a lack of community and unwillingness to take the creative risk of putting my ideas into the world for judgment. Most of all, skateboarding is a sport that has haunted me. After years of secretly pining for a cruiser board, I got my first board in 5th grade. I rode the two blocks to elementary school, and was immediately made fun of by a skater boy named Andrew. He told me that girls couldn't skate and that I would never be good. This, piled onto a year of bullying for anything I could really imagine, got the best of me, and I never rode my board to school again. I practiced half-heartedly in my driveway, but lost the motivation to learn how to ollie, which in my mind, was the beginning of the road to become a real skater.

In college, I had a couple of cruisers that I used for campus commuting. I got pretty comfortable, but never attempted to do anything more than slaloming between students to get to class. I remember spending one winter break in 2016 practicing freestyle everyday, but quickly lost that motivation to "safer" hobbies. I felt too old and a little too fragile to risk slamming my body into asphalt.

A couple of months ago, nearly 6 years after last attempting to level up on skate tricks, I decided to get back on a longboard. I was in the midst of healing from a pretty badly sprained ankle and training for a three day backpacking trip through Catalina Island, and unintentionally stumbled into r/longboards. I saw videos of longboard dancing and freestyle, which re-sparked an interest that has been pretty consistent throughout my life. While intrigued, I went down the same paths of thinking — that I'm too old now to learn something that requires so much practice and balance, too old to fall. During a late night of insomnia though, I also realized that I will never be younger than I am in this instant, and if I start thinking that I'm too old to do fun things now, I will miss out on so many potential passions for the rest of my life. The nagging feelings of wishing I did more, created more, shared more — they can only get worse. So I got myself a couple of boards, and I've been out skating pretty much every day since then. I've taken a fall, which was jarring, but nothing some preventative pads couldn't protect against. It's crazy how much joy kicking around on a 4-wheeled board can give me.