How has your day to day life been changed due to our current situation?
Before all this started, I spent a lot of my time outside— skating, scouting, planning, trips to coffee shops, wellness juice runs, happy hours-- when you remove all that I had a lot of free time on my hands. Not being able to freely skate around has been a hard one to get used to, but there was something bigger than that. The ebb and flow of energy.
I realized during all this that I get a lot of my energy from the people around me, and our interactions. Bouncing ideas, taking part in a multitude of activities, even something as simple as throwing someone a smile, that connect fuels me. Realizing I will not have that for a while has been daunting. I love people so so much, and I miss skating with them, taking their photos.
With all that being said, I’m not alone. We’re all dealing with this in our own ways, and I really feel we will make it out of this way more grateful for human interaction than ever before, and the air, have you seen it?? Smelled it? Earth is doing some healing :)
Have you been able to still take photos in general or skate?
Right when the Stay at Home order happened, I hit the streets for a city session knowing it would be a rare opportunity. It proved to be a wild, somewhat eerie experience. In the days/weeks that followed and the situation got worse, it hit me that skateboarding is such a consistently positive outlet for me. If I were to go on the streets and skate and not feel like I’m getting the same positivity reciprocated, then that would be a big bummer. So I’ve been trying really hard to not skate outside, just to protect my relationship with it.
In the photo world, things like updating my website, reading photo books and refreshing myself with old film gear, I’ve still been able to live in my visual brain.
What have you been doing to fill the time and harness some of your creativity?
For one, I now have a makeshift balance board, a soft trucks setup and a skater trainer setup, all different styles of practice boards and ones that I can use indoors. Thankfully I have concrete floors so I can still kind of mess around. :)
Definitely been coming up with some new recipes and getting creative with workouts. I’ve been doing things I haven’t been able to before because of, well, a normal, busy life. In that way, I’m so grateful! I’ve been organizing and going through then cleaning EVERYTHING— it’s been super rewarding :)
Other than that, lots of planning, lots of day dreaming— we will carve out the New normal soon <3
