Snowboarding, skateboarding and photography are the things that have made me who I am today. I’ve been snowboarding for my whole life, starting from when I was 5 years old. When I was 4, my parents tried to get me to learn how to ski, but after one day I was demanding that they let me learn to snowboard instead. Now I’m 18 years old, and snowboarding is still something I look forward to every winter. As humans, we have not been blessed with the ability to fly, but when you’re going down a mountain at 40 miles per hour and airing a couple feet into the air, it’s almost as if you were flying. There was a point in my life where I could no longer sit around during the spring and summer waiting to go snowboarding again, and that’s why I started skateboarding. What skateboarding meant to me was that I no longer had to wait half a year waiting for the cold winter months to come back. Now, I was always flying. When it was hot outside, I was soaring down a steep hill in Spanish Harlem, or zipping around the bowl at my local skatepark. In the winter, I was cruising down mountains until I was physically unable to move.
Photography is my only hobby, which I’ve been doing for a few years now. I have recently stopped using digital cameras and only use film now. I believe that shooting with film cameras forces the photographer to put a lot more consideration into the composition of their photos instead of mindlessly clicking a camera button. I find it fun to develop photos too, because after a few weeks or months, you completely forget what is on a roll of film. Occasionally I’ll get back my pictures and I’ll have no idea when or where I took a picture. The transition from shooting digital to shooting only film was hard, since my favorite thing to take pictures of was skateboarders, and shooting skateboarders with a film camera was way harder than doing it with a digital camera.
On September 21st, 2014 I attended the Climate March. This to me was a life changing event. 400,000 people showed up and it was the largest climate march in history. On the way there, I thought 20,000 people were going to show up, and I was thinking “oh, they’re just a bunch of hippies.” Nearly half a million people showed up, after talking to dozens of people that day, I realized that to change the world, you have to change yourself first. That day I learned that just eating meat is a huge factor in climate change, and just going from a meat eater to a vegetarian can cut your carbon footprint in half. Since then I have become strictly vegan, my dad is now a vegetarian and my mom has become a pescatarian.
I plan to leave New York City as soon as I can. The city has trapped me like a prisoner in a jailcell, and I’m just waiting for my sentence to be up, or for someone to bail me out. Nothing gets me through the day better than dreaming about living in the great outdoors.
I am Monica Mikolajczyk; I’m a skateboarder, a snowboarder, a photographer, a vegan and a dreamer.
