how to make paper wall hanging|origami|best diy creative craft idea|school kids tutorial|easy art

After a week on the couch with the curtains shut, I forced myself to go kite. Back to my happy place. The place that fixed everything. The ocean. Where when I'm in my flow, nothing else matters. I had my first panic attack while kiting. I couldn't breathe or get air into my lungs. My heart was pounding through my wetsuit. I thought I was having a heart attack. Every minute felt like eternity. It was the scariest moment of my life. Depression had taken from me what I loved the most. The ocean. My happy place. I've spent my life surrounded by madmen. People constantly pushing the limits. Toying with life and death. It's wild. It's extreme. The rockstar life. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Groupies, podiums, near death. The comebacks. The wins. The adventures. The fans. The followers. The career-ending injuries. Hospitals. Funerals. Suicide. I remember the day this nightmare began. The day I was diagnosed with major depression. My whole world turned upside down. How could this thing, my brain, that was responsible for all my achievements, all my relationships and everything good in my life, just fail me? I was confused. I was angry. And I was scared. So I did what I do every time I have a question. I went to Google that has all the answers. Mental health in extreme sports. Depression in surfing. Anxiety in athletes. But the answers I got weren't the ones I was expecting. Andy Irons dies in a hotel room after suffering from bipolar. Sonny Garcia in a coma after attempting suicide. Dave Mirra dies of self-inflicting gunshot wound. Ben Raymer dies of suicide. The articles continue. Death. Jail. Overdose. Suicide. How can this be possible? Do you have to kill yourself before people start talking? You want to hear something crazy? Men in their 30s are more likely to die of suicide than anything else. One in four men will suffer from depression at some point in their lives. But you wouldn't think so. The way everyone carries on. After months and months of research, it only left me with more doubts and more questions. Is there really any hope? Made it. Finally. Yeah, after seeing your Facebook post, I knew that I had to come out here, man. I've been feeling very similar feelings at the time and it just left me with so many questions like what else is out there and why is nobody talking about it really? So how are we going to do this? I'm not entirely sure to be honest with you, man, but there's only one way to start. Well, let's get started. My name is Ruben Lenton, 33 years of age. I mean, I was fortunate enough to grow up close by the seaside and when I was a little kid, like eight years old, I was playing with little power kites at the beach and then when I was 12 years old, I saw this massive inflatable kite up on the beach and he was riding on the water and I was like, whoa, that was the first kiteboarder I ever saw and I was inspired to get started. Shucks, I've been riding since I even like before I even knew riding, you know what I mean? When I was in varsity, I said to myself, out of varsity then give yourself until 25 to like make it as professional downhiller and then if it's not happening there, then cut it and get a job and like, you know, settle down. I was like as focused as I could be, you know, growing up and riding, it was like I didn't really care too much about the party and that kind of stuff, it was just I wanted to wake skate and I wanted to make sure, I wanted to prove a lot of people wrong. Yeah, I think there's definitely an element of sacrifice because I actually came out of school early and, you know, left my hometown early and was just on the road. You kind of miss some social part of growing up and, you know, I was kind of a bit more isolated and on the road and had certain friends but I was really kind of just in a competitive mindset and just, you know, following a world tour and just driven by results. Yeah, it's been very hard, I'd say, very challenging to be a pro kiteboarder, to be a young man traveling the world whilst being at the top of your game sport-wise and managing your business, you know. Kiteboarding is a small sport so the financing has always been kind of, yeah, a tough thing to get around. Soon as there's a paycheck attached to it and it's like, this is my job, this now has more consequences. If I go on this mission, usually it would be fun but now if you don't get the shot, if the wind isn't good, if the photographer's gear breaks down, now you have like this added pressure on your shoulders that you have to perform. You can't just enjoy regardless because that's what life is really. It's supposed to be just enjoying the process. Doing something on the top of your game, that's pretty much your life and that's also pretty much your identity, I think. So if somehow that is taken away from you, you really have to figure out who am I without this, you know what I mean. But yeah, you could talk about, if you wanted to get dark, you could be talking about fear. I've got a ******* treacherous fear of a wheelchair. It is such a real possibility in my sport. I feel like I'm okay with a femur or this or an ACL or that but at the moment I'm dreadfully concerned about breaking my back because then that's truly going to be a ---- one. I don't want to be there. When you know you start realizing you're in a small sport that maybe necessarily is not going to take you far once you stop doing it. You're not going to be when that day comes and I'm like maybe I can't wakeskate that often or anything of that sort. I don't know if other guys have felt this but as your career progresses, your goal and where you want to be kind of starts to change. You start going from maybe just wanting to be the best in South Africa, then you want to like be somewhere on the tour or be on someone on the wakeskate tour. There is a bit of an element of once you achieve your goals, you kind of wonder what's there at the end of it. Being 16, 17 years old, traveling the world, having all the sponsors, having all the kite gear you need, there's always this feeling inside you that it's never enough. No matter how good you are and how hard you train, there are so many good flyers that you will always not be the best. If your goal is just to be better than everybody else, quit. The more I see, the better I get, the more difficult flying that I do is the more I realize how much I suck and how many good flyers there are out there. It's all about the Instagram stats. As soon as your numbers start going up, you start feeling better about yourself. And then when they start going down, it seems to have the negative effect. I feel like we build expectations of ourselves from the content we consume, and then we build our identity on the content we produce and the comments we get. There's definitely some sort of image to be withheld, and I think the people that know me can totally tell I'm a different person to probably what maybe I'm portrayed as or my image might be. It's happened to me before, I post something that I'm not that stoked on, but it performs really well, and then I create a piece of content which I'm really proud of, and I'm like, oh what? It makes me question my own judgment. We've worked so hard for this glamorous life, but it's just so fragile. You could lose that at any stage. It is so high, but the fear of fall is just so present and in your face and surrounded by you all the time. Hey Paddy. Hey Graham, how's it? Hey, I'm doing good. How are you doing? Thank you. Thanks so much for giving me a call. I think about six months ago, I posted something about mental health and my journey more like in an artistic poem way, and everyone just saying like, I feel the same, thanks so much for sharing this. People sharing with me stuff they never shared with anyone else before, because they felt like they could open up to someone, but now we thought to take it to the next level. It'd be good to speak to a specialist and actually get some scientific and real information from you. Yeah, sure. What a cool project. I'll get back to you literally in the next hour or two, around either Tuesday or Friday. Great Paddy, thank you so much for the chat. Pleasure. Cheers. The concept of mental toughness is so spoken about and so applauded and so encouraged, and I think that is one of the biggest culprits. So personally, for me, mental toughness is bullshit. The misconception that is believed out there is that if you have doubts, if you have vulnerabilities, if you have fear, if you feel pressure, if you feel nerves, obviously you're mentally weak. That places massive pressure on athletes to not show that vulnerability, insecurity, doubt, negative thinking. What I can say is I've coached more than 100 different professional international athletes from 11 different sports around the world, and obviously spoken to a lot of people. I've yet to come across an athlete who doesn't have insecurity, doesn't have vulnerability, doesn't have doubt, doesn't have negative thoughts. Particularly the males have got very good at hiding those things. And how do you think injury plays a role in this whole thing? Because a lot of people don't realize, as you said, they don't realize they have any of these things, but as soon as COVID happens and you get locked in a room by yourself and have to spend time with yourself, or you get an injury and you can't perform how you want to, then all of a sudden your world falls apart. And then you see a lot of athletes go off the rails after that or struggle to come back from it. Yeah. So the amazing thing is that athletes aren't taught about the natural mental cycle that they will go through after injury, which I find is strange. I think I'm a kiteboarder in my veins, so my identity is very connected to being a kiteboarder. So when this first got taken away by my first injury, I collapsed. It's a fine line. With extreme sports, it is life or death in these scenarios. And your mind has to be so sharp because you can't **** up. You **** up, it's game over. I did my ACL also. Halfway extended my leg, snapped it backwards. ACL, MCL, broke my hand, broke my foot, ribs. Recently I popped like a spleen and a liver, landed on my head, broke my visor, like threw my goggles off. I'd say the two days before the op, I was like pretty in a bad mood. I broke my upper leg, my femur. The femur broke like straight in half and it just cut all the muscle to the right. Hit my quick release, it opened my kite release. I fell down from 10 meters, leaving my ankles shattered and all my cartilage gone. It felt like my leg just snapped in half. I fully tore my MCL, ACL and patella tendon all in one go. One second to the next, bam, snapped my ACL and it's your whole world. It just feels like it's ended and you're never going to be back where you want to be. The obvious one is your friends die. It happens, unfortunately. I have little doubt that I'll see more people die, but it's the nature of the beast, unfortunately. Almost every athlete, and it's not exactly the same way, but every one of them will go through denial, first of all. Like, I can't believe this is happening, why me? Then the next thing, once they've gone through the denial, will be some form of anger. It'll be anger at our equipment or anger at our coach or anger at somebody blaming somebody for what's happened. Then that anger doesn't satisfy anything. Then that anger's energy outwards towards someone, and then the energy more comes inwards. Then the next stage is depression. Am I going to come back? Will I ever recover? Will my career get back onto track? Will I be as good as I was? Will my sponsors still stay with me? Then we sink into depression cycle. That's very normal. The problem is when people get stuck in that depression cycle, and that then just cycles them down and down. Before the injury, I was more or less invincible, or so it seemed. After the injury, it just put a lot of doubt in my mind. Am I going to come back from this? Will I be able to do the same things I could before? That just then started to creep over into other areas of my life. Essentially, I think it came down to me just not feeling good enough or doubting that I was ever going to be good enough. One of the places I take it right back to at the core is ego. The male ego wants four things, and there's two of them that are particularly important in sport. It wants to look good. If we can't look good, it drives us to not look bad. In order to look good, what do we need as athletes? We need to win. We need to have the great picture. We need to be in the limelight. We need to post that thing that makes everyone think that we're great, because ego makes looking good incredibly important. Two of the biggest mental obstacles to success in any sport, and I hazard a guess in life, is pressure and fear. It's a concept we create in our own head. The more important we perceive a result to be, the more pressure we feel. The reason the ego desperately wants to win and desperately not want to lose is because it's insecure in its own fragility. As an athlete, there's just different issues that you come across with injuries, with social pressures. It can build up to something. I think everybody in every walk of life does go through some mental health issues where they struggle with certain things. For me, it's always tough. It's not really something I would talk about because of the life I actually lead. Some people are in jobs they don't want to be doing. They're just trying to make money to get by. A lot of people say, you live the best life, this and that. It's hard to argue with because when you actually break it down and look at what's perceived of what you're doing, it is incredible. It could be much worse. I think that probably it's not so much the mental state or the mental wiring of extreme athletes, but more the fact that you're in it alone. There's not a whole lot of money in quite a few of the sports, so you don't have that support and you're rewarded by doing extreme things. You're pushed to do that. I'm not sure how many extreme athletes want to do everything that they end up doing. Sometimes you do it because you have to for sponsors or from a competitive perspective. I wouldn't say I wasn't depressed back then, but super down and disappointed in my own body. Was death ever a part of your lows? I never had the thought of taking my own life, but my lowest point was I was eating a lot of Oxycodone. I got pretty hooked on it as well. It made the pain go away, but it also took away all my emotions, all my ability to sleep. One day I woke up and I tried to just step out of the bed because I was so high on that ---- that I forgot that I was injured. I just got out and stepped onto the leg and fell on the floor. I was just laying there. I was like, what's this, man? If there's a Zeus or however you want to call him, throw your thunderbolt and just let's get it over with. I'm done. I think that was my lowest low because I would never have thought that for one second in my life I would have that thought that I would just give up because we are sportsmen. We don't give up. We persevere and we go for it. I was in a bad place. It wasn't good. I felt very hopeless. I felt like I was just exposed, like torn open and exposed. Everything, like the change of wind direction felt like it was dragging across all my nerves, like exposed nerves and just dealing with anything, anything, like actual pain. I can't even describe it. I felt like I was just a burden to everybody around me and it was very hard to see a way out. Every man lives a life of quiet desperation and we go out there trying to fill that gap and it's the misconception is fame or money is going to fill that emptiness. It's not. It's Tuesday and I have had the exact same day. Although today I didn't sit around and do nothing. I had a full working day. I had three meetings. I've had Skype calls, meetings. I've been designing the new range, confirming all the new swag and designs for the season. So I've been pretty full on. I don't feel depressed. I don't feel anxious. I just feel like I don't have motivation to do anything. Being a professional kiteboarder, being that this is my job, being that this is what I love, being that this is what my, my happy place, my passion, like all angles point to just getting on the water. But yet I find myself sitting here and each minute that goes past, I get more and more pissed off at myself trying to figure out what it is that is doing this. It just sucks. I'm trying everything. I've stopped drinking. I've stopped partying. I've started eating healthy. I've been exercising. I've been doing yoga. I ******* hate yoga. I'm just on this constant, constant journey to try it and pull my ---- together. I just can't. I've got no reason. I've got, I've got a family that loves me and that I love. I've got people that care about me. I've got friends who would do anything for me. I've got a garage full of every toy I could imagine. I could travel tomorrow if I wanted to. I can book a ticket and travel somewhere, but I could do, I could do anything. And yeah, I'm sitting on my ******* ass here, moping around the house. And why? That is the question. Why? So tomorrow is another day. Looking back at the footage, I can't help but notice that there seems to be a strong tie between our identities and what we think of ourselves and how when that is taken away from you, then all these things surface. It seems like it's not just a problem with athletes, but with human beings. We all seem to be chasing something, chasing success, fame, happiness. And we're so focused on trying to achieve those things that we fail to enjoy or be happy in our current lives. You see, there's, there's a whole lot of cliches that they use so much. They've lost all their shine and glitz and glamour. Like life is a journey. It's not a destination. It's like so ******* old that it's like, yeah, yeah, we all know it. We heard it so many times, but do you really know it? Do you really understand what that means? Whatever happens in life, there's always equal drawbacks and benefits. No matter what happens, if I break my leg now, I can start focusing on the drawbacks of breaking my leg and start crying and wasting my time on that. Or I can see, oh, now I have time to focus on my health even more. I have time to sort out my music, to work on my business, spend more time with my family. There's equal drawbacks and benefits. So it's your call what you want to focus on. And I prefer to focus on the benefits because that's what's making me happy. Whilst there are times that I wish it never happened, I'm definitely grateful that it did because it gave me a wider outlook on, on life really. The, the one year out was pretty serious, but that actually gave me new motivation to get back on tour and do well. And I managed to come back, win a few of the world tour events during those, those seasons. I just think I want to develop myself now as a person. So I don't want to learn any new tricks or see any more girls or travel any more places. I just want to be able to upgrade my mind, upgrade my body. I just want to work on myself. So it's not going to get, gain me any money or respect, but it's just going to be for me. Like a lot of the bad stuff that's happened in my life has actually helped me to appreciate the process of what I'm going through, which in turn actually makes learning easier. And now I actually, I feel like I have something to give again. I love training. I love flying with my friends. I like competing. I don't mind if I lose, try to avoid it. I'll tell you a story. 2019 at world champs in Canada came in my qualifying run. It started pissing down rain, came into a corner and like just washed my front wheel out of a corner on a route and fell head first off like a five, six meter, like rock drop. Carried on racing to like qualify. And I like qualified and I was fuming that I had crashed in my qualifying run. I was like, what are you doing? Sort it out. The next day, first practice, a New Zealand guy came in, did exactly the same crash as me, washed his front wheel, went over the bars, landed, broke his back. And he learned to walk again and out-trained me and beat me the other year later. Well, I was quite inspired by that. But at the time I was like, well, like don't bitch and moan about a crash in the qualifying run. If the guy behind you like just broke his back. And I was like, Teo, you need to work harder than that. And in 2021, I came back and I was way fitter and stronger and I had my best season ever. Looking back on it now, it's really taken me to the next level in life. And from all these struggles have come so many positive outcomes to the point where we can actually make a documentary and get people talking about this. What a mission, man. It's been crazy just for me coming out here and knowing that we were going to shoot this documentary. It's been such a learning process speaking to these other athletes and knowing that it's not just me that feels like that. And yeah, it's been super cool, man. Yeah, I find it really interesting just talking to all these people and realizing that the bottom line is that we just need to talk about it. And you can't just keep that ---- in yourself and think that you can muscle through it or push through it or not. We can be too weak for it. I think just talking about it is like the most important thing. And it's definitely scary. Like I think in my journey, the thought of speaking up, it scares me, you know, but we are all human at the end of the day. And I think that is so important that we're there for one another. What advice would you give your younger Ryan? I think I would say life is definitely a roller coaster. It's always going to have its ups and downs. But I think that's what makes it so beautiful is there is so much uncertainty. And, you know, if you are getting to a bad spot, then then reach out, you know, you can, there is always help to be found. Your biggest challenges make you grow the most. Whatever happens to me now, it's going to make me grow and life is about growth. Enjoy it. Enjoy every like moment. Sometimes just step back, look around you and be like, gotta be really grateful for this stuff. Life is difficult. And when you accept life is difficult, life is no longer difficult. Somehow when things happen a year down the line, they start making sense. It all kind of figures itself out in a way and then trust the process. I'd say to anyone young, ride your bike and have as much fun as possible, like at all costs. Stay well clear of parties and girls because they are like the biggest career enders other than injuries. And if you can make it past like 20, then you're rocking and rolling. What advice would I give to a younger Graham? Life is tough. It's scary and it's not fair. It's going to get dark and you're going to have to look your demons right in the eyes if you want to get out alive. But the suffering is worth it and it's necessary because it's going to shape who you are and what you love. It's going to build your character so strong and make you capable of greatness. And then it's going to slap you right in the face and take you back down to hell. And you're going to have to fight your way out again. You have to climb the highest mountains if you want to see the best views. And believe me, it's so ******* majestic.