By now, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that most of my past year has been spent at the skatepark. I started roller skating as a pandemic hobby and a way to cope with having lost music and basically everything else that made my life worthwhile. When I first set foot in the skatepark, I could have never imagined it leading me where it has.
Over the past eight months or so, I have made so many new friends and really expanded my world and my comfort zone. I have become more in touch with my own movement, something I could never claim to be before. I have gained the courage to take risks, which was something I used to do without thinking, but which I realized I hadn’t done in a long while.
There was one day last summer where I was at the skatepark with my friend and skate mentor. On this particular day, I was struggling with my own personal demons, with a failing relationship and a loss of everything I had ever worked for, with the endless, tireless, abyss that was and is 2021. I remember standing with her at the edge of a bowl that I had been aptly calling, “the spooky bowl,” for months, listening to her try to convince me to drop in to it.
I wasn’t going to take the risk, but she told me something that changed my whole perspective on skating, and on life in general. It was only three simple words: Do it scared. Something about this little gem of wisdom clicked everything into place for me. I realized I had been living a life that someone else chose for me. I was in a situation, a city, a life, that wasn’t my own and I had been too afraid to do anything about it. I realized that if I don’t do it while I’m scared, I’ll never do it at all.
Why am I writing about skating on a music blog, you might ask.
I have just begun recording my next single, “Deep End”, which is heavily influenced by my time at the skatepark. “Deep End” explores the fragments of myself that, up until recently, I was too afraid to glue back together. This song is about treading water to keep from drowning, about doing whatever it takes to stay alive just long enough to gather the courage to pull yourself out of the abyss.
“Deep End” is about doing it scared. I can’t wait for you all to hear it in the new year!
Mystee 