Riding long boards wasn't as difficult as one might assume. Whenever I had visited my friend's house, we would use her long boards to go places. I always have this weird fear that I'm being judged whenever I ride, and that because I know there are so many eyes on me, I tend to mess up more and am more self conscious about how I'm supposed to be riding this board. It never ends well; lots of tripping and falling because of rocks.

I use to have a penny board and it broke last halloween, but I've probably only ridden it 4-5 times prior so my riding skills were slim. I was too embarrassed about the fact that I might trip and fall off my board to ever ride it around people.

Now, after just recently riding a long board, I had assumed I'd be okay with riding my friend's again. We steered towards her other friends house to meet up and do some late night quad riding. I was so excited that I wasn't even thinking about my fear of being seen falling off a board, that I took off without another thought.

As we approached a very public road that was being heavily lit by car lights and also had tons of turns, I started to slow down and worry which allowed my friend- let's call her Taylor- to pass me. As the distance between us started increasing, she started to yell at me more saying I should hurry up so I did as told. Now Taylor wasn't looking back, but I was busy trying to maneuver the board around a turn that had a bunch of gravel everywhere. I wanted to walk, but Taylor had looked back again to yell that I still needed to hurry, so I hopped on the board and pushed.

I felt the board come to a very sudden stop and immediately closed my eyes as I quickly realized I had flown off. It felt as though the moment was happening in slow motion and I can easily recall every millisecond. My first instinct was to use my arm to stop the sudden concrete impact, and as my hand came in contact with the sidewalk, the sudden weight on my arm caused it to bend the wrong way and I felt it happen. My first thought being "shit, I broke it!" I took the hard fall and couple scrapes easily, but my forearm had a sharp pain and my fingers had gone numb. I was screaming it hurt so bad.

Now Taylor, who saw the whole thing, slowly-Slowly- approached me and laughed as I screamed. "That was smooth," she had said with a slight chuckle and a smile. I yelled at her to stop being stupid and to realize the fact that my arm was trying to bend in a way it shouldn't. Once the realization finally processed, she acted as though I had only gotten a small scratch, but still asked if I wanted to head back.

After telling myself "suck it up and get over it, you don't need help," I pushed on and didn't turn back to her house. I tried to ignore the pain and still had fun. Now lucky for me, I found out that my arm didn't snap in half, but my entire elbow is inflamed and I may have a minor fracture, but I'm stupid and extremely stubborn so I refused all help for two days and kept saying I'm fine, which I technically am.

Here's to the next few weeks of pretending my arm is fine and potentially making it worse because I refuse to do my normal activities a different way to compensate for this little annoying injury.