Skateboarding is life

My name is Brandon Turner. I'm a professional skateboarder in the mental health, substance abuse industry. Keep skating because skateboarding is my passion. It's my outlet. It's my exercise. It's my life. I've been skateboarding pretty much more than I've been doing anything else. It's uh it's life to me. When I'm setting up a board, it's a form of therapy for me. It's like meditation, like putting on the wheels and the bolts and the grip tape and just the sounds and everything. It's just you're in the moment of uh putting something to together new and releasing the old. And it gives me time to reflect on how good this board's going to be and what I'm going to do with it. Not only that, just gives me time to reflect on my life, too. what's going good and also what's going bad. And especially after the journey I've been on and stuff and the lessons I've learned, stuff's been good. But also, you know, we all make mistakes. And whether that's in personal relationships or just in life, it's a good time to meditate and reflect on that. And putting together a board is just like putting back the pieces together. and it gives you some sort of fulfillment of completing something even if everything else has fallen apart or it's doing really well. Let me say what it's not. I don't think having mental health issues is a bad thing because I think all of us deal with some sort of mental health issues, know someone or have been through some struggles in life. And I just think it's the willingness to work on yourself and continue to learn and grow. That's the important thing. And even if you do make mistakes or you are struggling with something, you're not alone. And there's people like you or me who've been through similar situations and they've came out of it and been successful. So even with me going through things like this year, I've went through some things and made mistakes and stuff and all I can do is um learn from those mistakes of what I can do differently and how I can be a better person from that because I believe that even though there's something negative going on, there's always a positive. There's always something you can learn from it and there's a different perspective you can look at it. what got me to keep going is just um having faith and believing in myself and other people's testimonies of you know there's always someone who has it worse you know and that's something I learned you know being incarcerated and stuff and just you know feeling sorry for myself and there's always someone who had it way worse people who weren't coming home and relationships you know go through things or there's always someone who's been through it way worse than you and they've figured it out and just didn't give it up. It ended up working out. So, I just think you got to just keep pushing, you know, and that's why I love skateboarding so much because you just doesn't matter about the tricks or how you maneuver as long as you just keep going and get on your board and keep pushing. And that's skateboarding, too. Just like life. — Beautiful. — Perfect. What's that?