In 2018, I stopped lying to myself. All at once.
Just a quiet admission, somewhere in the back of a life that looked fine from the outside that none of it was mine. The trajectory I was on, the stability I was building toward, the version of myself I was performing every day, it belonged to someone else's idea of what my life should look like. The stability my parents told me I would have doesn't exist anymore. Maybe it never did. And the moment I stopped pretending otherwise was the moment everything fell apart and the moment everything actually began.
I've been an athlete as long as I can remember. The kind that needs the edge. The kind that feels most alive when the margin for error disappears and the only thing left is reaction and will. Supermoto. Motocross. Adrenaline. I had my time in it early. And for a while, it was the only thing that made sense. The only place where I felt like I was operating as myself. But it wasn't treated like a path. It was treated like a leash. Something to keep me in line, not something to build a life around. When it stopped, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I stopped caring. About academics, direction, and the future that everyone kept insisting I should want. If the thing that connected me to everything was gone, what exactly was I supposed to be working toward?
The adrenaline didn't disappear when the sports did. It just found worse places to live. I won't dress it up. The destruction was total. inside and out. Relationships. Stability. The person I was trying to become. All of it paid the price for a hunger I didn't know how to feed any other way. Depression moved in quietly and stayed for years. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the job gone, the car gone, the apartment gone, the old life dismantled piece by piece, I found the only thing I hadn't lost yet. The part of me that still wanted something. That part is stubborn. Unreasonable. Refuses to be practical about any of this. I've decided to stop arguing with it.
It's 2026. I run a website called Die Hard Athletics. I write about the inner psychology of action sports athletes and the people who make the events happen. The stories nobody tells, the moments that don't make highlight reels, the cost of living close to the edge and choosing to stay there anyway. I volunteer at rally events. I travel by bus and mountain bike. I stand on roads in the middle of nowhere and wait for cars to pass and feel, for the first time in a long time, like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I don't have a clean path forward. I won't pretend that I do. What I have is a direction. A pull. A set of instincts that have been wrong about a lot of things but have never been wrong about this.
Action sports is where I belong. The storytelling, the analysis, the community, the culture, all of it. I don't know yet exactly what shape that takes. I don't know what the industry will let me build or what I'll have to build around it. But I know the feeling of standing in the right chaos. And I know what it costs to ignore it. --- For a long time I carried a compass. Followed the needle wherever it pointed...toward stability, toward convention, toward the life that was supposed to make sense. And every time I followed it faithfully, I ended up somewhere that felt like someone else's destination.
So I'm done with the compass. It's time to pick up the machete. Not in anger. Not in desperation. In clarity. There is no map for where I'm going. No trail markers, no established route, no guarantee of what's on the other side of the next ridge. Just the work, the instinct, and the willingness to move through terrain nobody has cleared yet. That's not recklessness. That's navigation. The real kind. --- I don't know exactly where this leads. But I know I'm moving. And for the first time in a long time, that's enough.
- MR. BONEZ