Personal Essay: Skateboard Therapy

Skateboard Therapy

Therapy is undoubtedly an effective way of treating problems physical and mental, but therapy doesn’t necessarily need to be in a medical setting, or even overseen by a therapist! Regardless, It is important to react when something is wrong; everyone has a coping method for their problems, and that is why I believe that skateboarding is good medicine. I believe that skateboarding is good medicine, not in a physical way, it’s not some sort of a band-aid that you can throw on a wound, but an activity that can be used to treat many problems; the sort of problems that can’t be fixed by a band-aid or a pill, the sort of problems that can be created with a pill. You see, medicine isn’t always a good thing, in fact, a lot prescriptions

At this point, I only saw skateboarding as a mode of transportation or the cure to boredom. As time went on I got to know that skateboarder more and more, we even started skating together. He would always make little comments about his life that i wouldn’t fully understand. One day I went to his house and he decided to tell me his story, a story that would change the way I see hobbies like skateboarding forever. He showed me his mugshot, and he told me for years he was addicted to opiates. It all started with a prescription that a doctor gave him, and the dosage was so high that he didn’t even need to abuse the medication in order to develop an addiction, well, this unfortunate man graduated on to heroin, a scourge that runs rampant throughout America. He said he had been to therapy and he had been to rehab, but they didn’t work. You see, everyone has their own kind of therapy, and to some people that is the only kind of therapy that will work for them, and by putting his all into skateboarding, heroin became just a mere footprint in the trail of his life. It is always a great story to tell, how something as simple as skateboarding saved someone's