Skateboarding made me realise: I’m a writer – I need my wrists

The day after my first novel was released in 2020, I walked to my local skate shop in Redfern and purchased a $270 skateboard.

The woman behind the counter at Basement Skate (RIP) gently recommended I start on a longboard. I told her I was celebrating a personal milestone and wanted to reward myself by starting a new hobby.

In truth, I was afraid that having accomplished what I’d wanted for so long (publish a book), I was at risk of becoming an asshole, too confident in myself. I wanted to dive into something awkwardly tricky, but specifically, something uncomfortably outside myself. I wanted to become close acquaintances with the feeling of weakness.

Author Jessie Tu published her first novel, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, in 2020 – the same year she took up skateboarding.Credit: Louie Douvis

I have never had a strong desire to skate, nor ever crushed on a skater boy as a teenager. But in the summer of 2018, I watched Jonah Hill’s love letter to his adolescence, Mid90s – a film that made me yearn to be a boy growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the mid-90s.

Skating’s anti-authoritative subculture is inextricable from youth. Carrying a board signals a sense of looseness, aplomb, and nonchalance. It has always felt too cool for me. But I admired skaters’ aerial grace and found their physical swiftness deeply appealing, not as something I necessarily wanted to replicate.

Jessie Tu skateboarding at the Carriageworks.

My partner used to skate as a kid. Growing up in rural NSW, that was how he bonded with the local boys. He did tricks – boardslide, kick flips, twisting his torso in mid-air to land 180s.

At some point, he said, around the time he turned 12 or 13, he couldn’t do the tricks any more. His body refused to take the leaps. His brain was telling him not to do it.

In the summer of 2020, he had an excuse to pick it up again. He taught me the basics. We skated/walked to Carriageworks every day, spending hours going back and forth along the expansive concrete. During that time, there were often other people playing tennis against the walls, roller skating, and riding scooters. Several times, many established skaters would stop to give me a few pointers.

The task at hand was simple — I wanted to learn something new, something hard, and be gracious at sucking at it. I didn’t want to excel. I just wanted to skate on a flat surface comfortably without falling, to move from point A to point B on a piece of wood and plastic with wheels attached.

Tu’s longboard. She said she just wanted to skate on a flat surface comfortably without falling

It was important for me to understand on a corporeal level what it meant to fail every day. And every day I got on that skateboard, I fell. I fell several times each hour. I broke my wrist twice.

I was painfully self-conscious of how I must have appeared to others. Skating is an almost exclusively youth-oriented sport. Although you see the occasional man over 30 or 40 skating, it is not something you pick up past a certain age. The stakes (physical) are a bit too high. There is also something undignified about falling as an adult if one can prevent it!

In the evenings, I’d walk to Sydney Park to watch the skaters. I marvelled at their casual agility and seeming malleability, at once both brisk and lax. I am an observer. I am not a joiner. I cannot function at social gatherings with more than two people. I refuse to dance in public. But watching gives me a lot of pleasure.

I’m a very impatient person, and skating requires patience. At some point, it got to be too much. I’m a writer – I need my wrists.

A few years ago, I started telling people, “When I grow up, I want to be a kid”. Essentially, my goal in life is to return to the state of being a kid. Skating feels like a physical manifestation towards this state of being. I just wish it didn’t hurt so much when you fall.

Jessie Tu is the author of the novel A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing. She is a journalist at Women’s Agenda and a book critic for the Herald and The Age.

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