D@n

A late 1970’s photo… The young me was troubled, wild and free. I had a lot of Pent-Up R@G3 when I was younger. I came from a multi-generational alcoholic family and a father with his own unresolved trauma and having to fit into a “whiteness” peg in society, I guess. So much was his secret shame that he didn’t want me and my brothers to learn Spanish. I remember the paperwork we kids had to fill out in the catholic grade school we were sent to. The choices we had when it came to race was either black or white. Our families had no clue about any connection to culture and family members didn’t talk about Indigeneity. As kids my brothers and I where hit by hand, belt and or physically thrown up against a wall. We were at the mercy of a person who was spiritually lost, emotionally immature and undeveloped and physically abused by his own parents. I was the object of his rage, anger, jealousy and alcoholism. It was the psychological trauma that hurt the most for me. Shamed harshly in public, knuckled on the head for being shy and afraid to talk to people when he wanted to show off his young, first son. I remember as a kid, at least once a stranger trying to protect me from my father, telling my father not to treat me the way he did. Many events like this over time in my youth started to build in me anger, rage, anxiety, depression and a sense of deep shame and self loathing. So much later in my teens and early adult life I wanted to be gone from this world. I developed a deep sense and connection to injustices in life… I never let anyone else that I knew get picked on by bullies if I could help it. So as a teenager some of the ways I released or subdued anxiety and untreated depression was to drink hard, take pills and get into the occasional street fight. The rage building in me was too intense and I had no one to help me work my struggles out back then. Today, over time, my Higher Power has answered my pleading for answers to life and mainly what is the fkn truth about life because life didn’t make any sense to me especially with all the hypocrisy I witnessed, in Catholic Church alone! I MADE IT, GDI 🤲🏽🙏🛹🤎🌍☯️🪶

#decolonize #skate #ushegemony #freepalestine