Why I Started Skateboarding
In short, it was the best way for me to escape the tyrannical authoritarian dictatorship created at home.
“It’s ironic that this often hidden quality is what initially attracted me to it because most people see skateboarding as a performing art, something that people do to show off. That was never a reason I was drawn to it.”
My life had been a performance for my parents and other authority figures for over a decade. I had lived life for everyone else but myself until the age of thirteen. From a very early age, I was conditioned to make my parents happy. I was emotionally manipulated into being responsible for my parents emotions. They had this pattern they would fall into where my mom would feel overwhelmed because of something I was doing, get noticeably upset within earshot of my dad, and then he would storm in with the wrath of God and dole out punishment without gaining any understanding of the problem or how he himself was being manipulated by mom. I would stop whatever undesired behavior that was being acted out without understanding why. This lack of explanation is what fueled the engine that powered this vessel throughout my life. Going on doing things without understanding why I needed to do them was a feeling I did not tolerate.
Looking back on my childhood, I distinctly remember doing my best to behave in a way that made my parents happy at the cost of going against what I wanted to do with my time. I did organized sports and boy scouts to please them, not because I actually wanted to do these things. I didn’t want to let them down. This is very surface level evidence for the type of behavior I engaged in. There was nothing overtly oppressing about my upbringing but obedience to my parent’s commands was stressed as a necessary part of life. Some might say I was sheltered. I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of popular T.V. shows like The Simpsons and South Park. I was allowed to go out but I was made to return home quite early, especially when I started skateboarding.
When I was doing the things my parents wanted me to do, when I was jumping through all the hoops performing for them, I received praise and I was given more freedom and trust. When I left every structured environment they had set up for me to participate in, I was given less space to be myself and I was given less trust. I was made out to be ungrateful and selfish. I began to feel my autonomy under fire. During a time when more freedom is supposed to be given, I experienced less of it. Very concentrated efforts were made to keep me close to home. While I’m immensely grateful for it, I see the subtle ulterior motive behind building a halfpipe in the backyard (long after I moved out, we learned the plot of land where it sat was not part of our property). I also had a couple of boxes and a rail to skate, keeping me close to the home. A lot of the time, I wasn’t allowed to travel around and skate with my friends when they went on street missions, and I was constantly reminded that I had a miniramp and a box to skate; this is when they would wield grief to make me feel ungrateful. I was, for the most part, kept at home to skate. I was on a short leash as some might say.
I think they attempted to keep me close to home because they saw skateboarding as an activity that would ruin my life, something that would drag me into less desirable social circles. The sad part about this is that it was their control that fueled the drive towards skateboarding, and the more they attempted to drag me away from it, the harder I would lean into it; it was my form of escape from this very same control. The more fear they acted on, the more their fears came alive. It became this tug of war that has continued on to this very day.
When I started skateboarding I quickly figured out I wouldn’t ever want to stop doing it. It was something I enjoyed for a lot of reasons that are directly related to its ability to stimulate and satisfy core aspects of my being; a large part of who I am, who we all are, is how we were raised. After about two years in, I started to experience my family treating me differently. They wanted me to find something else to pursue, but they dared not to tell me directly. The majority consensus did leak out through my sister Christyn one day when she outright told me she thought “it’s stupid.”
The pressure to pick a career to pursue began to mount after my sophomore year of high school. It was as though what I had already accomplished, what I had become a major part of my life already, wasn’t enough for them, or they wanted me to pick something different but they didn’t know how to tell me except by asking, “How are you going to make money Correy?” They didn’t see any of the success I had achieved, and if they did, they didn’t see it the way I saw it. The more they tried to rush me into an established, predetermined career track, the more I focused on skateboarding. By the time I was a freshman, I had developed the compulsion to skateboard every day no matter what, and I did this until I was in my senior year when I got my first job. I worked to escape school and get paid so I could get a camera, an Xbox and money for boards.
I’m starting to see why I was drawn to skateboarding; why I felt so captivated by it. I was free from any structured environment that put me in a position that forced me to spend my time attempting to listen to other people poorly communicating things they wanted me to do for reasons you couldn’t pay me enough to care about. When I was skateboarding, I didn’t feel pressure to perform for anyone. This is the biggest thing about skateboarding that attracted me to it almost instantly. It’s ironic that this often hidden quality is what initially attracted me to it because most people see skateboarding as a performing art, something that people do to show off. That was never a reason I was drawn to it.
Although, knowing what I know now, it’s more accurate to say that being in a state of liberty is the biggest thing about a person that will attract skateboarding to them almost instantly.
Every waking moment of my life was spent performing for other people and it was the only time I could let go, be myself and live my life for no one else but me. The pressure was off. It was most certainly an escape from my life at home. I would not have felt such strong conviction to stick with it if I didn’t feel so judged, constricted, and used outside of skateboarding.
Unlike anything else I tried, I seemed to have a natural ability to progress in it. I was learning things at a much faster rate than my peers so it gave me a boost of confidence that I rarely felt. The only other area in my life I felt this type of confidence was drawing or when I hit the ball in a game which happened once or twice a season. There was a much higher rate of return on satisfaction for the amount of time I spent practicing skateboarding, and the best part is I could practice whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted, and there exists an infinite amount of places to practice it. The major plus is that it’s athletic so my parents didn’t have an argument against me doing it in place of organized sports, but they still inserted their aggressive helicopter parenting into my experience by forcing me to wear a helmet. They would take it away from me if I was caught not wearing it and they would definitely check.
I was confused as to why my parents wanted me to keep looking for something else to pursue. “How are you going to make money!?” they would yell at me in protest.
Why wouldn’t they bother to get into it? Why did they do their best to remain ignorant to the world of skateboarding? I had arrived in a space where I was confident I wanted to plant roots in professionally. I was in the world of business at the early age of fourteen. I was putting together and delivering presentations for the city council. I managed productions and fund raising campaigns. I was very active in the development of the local scene yet significant effort was put into pulling me away from everything I was part of and developing. It made no sense to me.
Shortly after I began skateboarding, I was given an ultimatum sometime just before my junior year.
- Get a job and get an apartment or
- Go to school and have my living paid for
All I wanted to do was skateboard. I had just started living my life, I just found something I wanted to do, not what someone else wanted me to do, why did I need to choose something else? Why did I have to fit into this predetermined track? Why was I encountering no help from my family to cultivate and develop a presence within the skateboarding industry? Why is it with everything else, they got themselves as involved as they possibly could to ensure I was successful but when it came to skateboarding, the one thing I found for myself, something that wasn’t introduced to me, something I organically chose to do, I was left to figure it out all on my own. They had no faith in my ability to do something with myself in the space nor would they get involved beyond transporting me to skateparks every now and then.
When the time came for me to make a decision, I picked something I could do that would keep me near skateboarding and I picked a location where there wouldn’t be a shortage of spots. Photography in Houston. What I looked forward to the most was that it got me away from my parents. What’s ironic is that I stopped actively skateboarding once I arrived to Houston because I thought I needed to film the stuff I was doing or wanted to do but for the first time, I encountered the number one reason that stopped me from riding my board throughout my adulthood; I had nobody to film with, so what’s the point of skateboarding? It’s ironic because I was no longer skateboarding for the original reason I got into it. I had gotten myself into this rhythm in high school where I felt like I needed to only make videos. I recognize that I never thought about making videos when I started, however when I started, the technology to make videos was still in development for the consumer level and I was ignorant to the structure of the industry and that making videos is simply a massive part of the world of skateboarding. I missed being part of a couple of feature length films in my later high school years due to a falling out of my original squad so I felt like I needed to make up for lost time and opportunity.
I had escaped the environment created by my parents. I was no longer surrounded by rigid limitation so I didn’t need an outlet to feel free and in control of my life. I was doing something I had originally discovered on my own; making representations of my perceptions of the world around me.