As some of you may know, a few years back, our good friend John Gardner quit Creature, DC and all his sponsors to focus his time on studying social work and working in mental health outreach. Late last year, he gave a TED talk as a part of their TEDxUnity Park series, and it just went online.
In “Shoulder To Shoulder,” John recounts his own mental health struggles and those of his peers — including many skaters who we have lost to suicide — to better understand how men can find paths for positively communicating their feelings to one another. Obviously skateboarding feels like a safe space to find community, especially when there is such aggressive self-isolation from any human interaction in our society, but that doesn’t make us immune to feeling depressed, lonely, or even suicidal. It is too easy to joke it away, say “whatever, fuck it,” or physically exert and overextend ourselves on our skateboards to try and drown out these feelings. If you know John, you known that he feels like a shining beam of light and positivity whenever he’s on the sesh, but like anyone else, he talks about how skateboarding can also become a coping mechanism to suppress what’s really going on inside.
So give it a watch. Talk to your friends. Tell your homies you love them. And know that even the people closest to you are going through their own shit that you likely only know a fraction of. Shout out to John for fighting the good fight ❤️
* And yes, we know there’s a Rodney Mullen TED talk, and John isn’t the first skater to do one, but John is the bro and Rodney Mullen is Rodney Mullen. (And also definitely the bro.)
the World needed this after Micky Papa’s Ted Talk