Skateboarding as a Second Language

• Posted by Dez Fontaine May 13 Filed in Personal #Communication  #street culture  #skateboarding culture  #self-expression  #youth identity  55 views
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  I never thought about it this way until like three weeks ago, but skateboarding is basically how I learned to communicate when words weren't cutting it anymore. Not in some corny metaphorical way either. I'm talking about actual translation happening in real time.

  See, I grew up in a house where feelings got stuffed down and conversations got weird real fast. My pops wasn't the talking type, my moms stayed busy, and I was just this angry kid with too much energy and nowhere to put it. Then at like eleven years old, my boy Marcus showed me his deck and suddenly I had a completely different vocabulary. A kickflip meant something. A manual meant something. Landing something after two hundred tries meant I could do hard things. That's not nothing.

  What's wild is watching other people figure this out too. I'll be at the park and see some quiet kid, the type who never speaks in class probably, just absolutely flowing on their board. And you can read their whole mood on the concrete. You can see if they're working through something hard or if they're just feeling themselves that day. The board becomes their mouth. The tricks become their sentences. And everybody around them gets it without anybody saying anything.

  The skate community doesn't really require you to perform linguistically if you don't want to. You can just show up, do your thing, nod at people, and that's a full conversation. But you can also be as expressive as you want to be. Some people use their board to tell stories about where they've been, what they've survived, what they're trying to prove. Some people use it to say I'm here and I'm not invisible. Some people use it to say I'm different and that's okay.

  I think that's why skateboarding hits so different across all these different worlds and communities and countries and everything. It's a language that doesn't need translation. A kid in Tokyo understands what a kid in Detroit is saying on their board. A fifty year old who skated in the eighties can watch a fifteen year old now and still get the message. There's no accent or dialect that gets in the way. Just skill, creativity, heart, and time on the pavement.

  The thing about learning a language is that once you speak it fluently, you can't really go back to not speaking it. Skateboarding broke open something in me that made it impossible to go back to being a person who stuffs things down and says nothing. It taught me that your body can say what your mouth is scared to say. That movement can mean more than words ever could. That sometimes the best conversations happen without any talking at all.

  Now I'm just this person who looks at everything a little differently. I see people moving through the world and I'm trying to read what they're expressing. I'm waiting for people to find their board, whatever that looks like for them. That one thing that lets them speak when speaking feels impossible.

  What's your language? What do you do when words aren't enough anymore?