The Weird Grief of Outgrowing Your Skate Crew

• Posted by Dez Fontaine May 16 Filed in Personal #Friendship  #change  #grief  #skateboarding culture  #growing up  71 views
  click to rate

  I'm sitting in my apartment at like two in the morning and I'm thinking about how skateboarding communities are basically families you choose, except sometimes you have to break up with them. And that's the part nobody really talks about.

  See, when you're young and hungry, your crew is everything. You're all broke in the same way, all obsessed in the same way, all sleeping on couches and eating gas station burritos because those are the only meals that make sense between sessions. You spot each other. You get each other up when you're scared. You celebrate the first kickflip like it's a Grammy and cry together when someone takes a board to the face that draws actual blood. That's real. That's sacred.

  But then life does this weird thing where it doesn't do the same thing for everybody at the same time. Someone gets a real job. Someone moves across the country. Someone's knees start talking to them in ways they can't ignore. And you're still there, still hungry, but now you're hungry alone or with new people who don't understand why you care so much about landing a tre flip on a specific stairset at two in the morning.

  The grief is stupid because it's not a death, right? It's just evolution. It's growth. Everyone tells you that's beautiful and necessary and whatever. And it is. But it's also kind of devastating in a way that's hard to explain to people who weren't there in that parking lot at midnight when everything felt like it mattered more than air.

  What gets me is how skateboarding keeps being this constant while the people rotate. The spots stay the same. Your body remembers how to push. But the people who made it magic are doing other things now. Living other lives. And you respect that even though some small part of you wishes you could all just stay frozen in that moment where you thought you'd be cruising together forever.

  That's the thing about skateboarding nobody warns you about. The community is the whole thing, and then one day you wake up and realize you're moving through it alone.

  Have you ever had to choose between a scene that made you happy and a version of yourself that needed to change?