Dez Fontaine

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SKATEBOARDING AND THE ART OF LOOKING STUPID IN FRONT OF PEOPLE YOU RESPECT

  • Posted by Dez Fontaine Tue at 9:00 PM Filed in Recreation #personal growth  #Authenticity  #community  #skateboarding culture  #failure  39 views
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    I got pushed by this girl named Maya at the park yesterday. Not like aggressive pushed, but the kind of shove that means something. She was watching me try the same line for like twenty minutes, failing the same way every single time, and she just rolled up and went "yo, you're thinking too much." Then she literally pushed me away from my board and showed me how she does it, which is nothing like how I was attempting it, and suddenly my body understood what my brain couldn't translate.

    That moment stuck with me though because it made me think about this weird paradox in skateboarding that nobody really talks about. We're all out here trying to look cool, right? That's the whole unspoken contract. You show up to the park with your aesthetic locked in, your board is dialed, your fit is right, and then immediately you proceed to eat concrete and look like the least coordinated person on the planet. Over and over. In front of people who matter to you.

    Most activities you do this in private. You learn piano behind closed doors. You practice singing in your car. You study for tests in your bedroom. But skateboarding? Skateboarding is this beautiful brutal thing where your learning happens in full view of everyone. Your failures are public. Your progression is witnessed. And somehow that's supposed to be cool instead of terrifying.

    I think that's actually what makes skate culture different from a lot of other communities. We've normalized this idea that being bad at something is not only acceptable but necessary. Like, the park isn't a place you go when you've already figured it out. It's a place you go specifically because you haven't. We celebrate the person who just learned to kickflip the same way we celebrate the person landing tre flips down stairs, and that's genuinely wild when you think about it. Where else does that happen?

    My boy Terrance and I were talking about this the other night and he was like, "the skate community is the only place where falling is basically your job description." And he's right but also it's deeper than that. Falling is your job, but getting back up and doing it again while people watch you is kind of the entire point. You're teaching yourself how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You're training your brain to not care what the random person sitting on the bench thinks about you eating asphalt.

    That skill transfers, man. Like, I notice skaters handle rejection different. We handle criticism different. We handle change different. Because we've already made peace with the fact that most of what we try won't work on the first attempt or the fifth or the fiftieth. The board teaches you early that failure isn't the end state, it's the process. It's just what happens between where you are and where you want to go.

    But here's the thing that gets me. The closer you get to actually landing something consistent, the more you realize it was never about looking cool in front of other people. It was about proving something to yourself that can't be proven any other way. You can't convince yourself you're capable through talking about it or thinking about it. You have to convince your body. You have to do it enough times, fail enough times, get back up enough times, until your body just knows.

    And once you figure that out, once that clicks in your brain, looking stupid doesn't matter anymore because you're not doing it for the audience. You're doing it because there's this thing your body wants to do and you want to know what it feels like when it finally does it right.

    Maya didn't push me to be nice. She pushed me because she saw me stuck in my own head, and she knew from experience that sometimes you need to get out of your way before you can move forward. That's skateboarding in a nutshell though. We're all just pushing each other in the directions we couldn't get to alone.

    So what's the thing you've been too self-conscious to try because you didn't want to look stupid doing it? Because I'm telling you, the park is full of people looking stupid together, and somehow that's where the real magic happens.