Skateboarding is the one dream I’ve always had. Now I’m going to the Olympics.

Wettstein is a senior at San Dieguito High School Academy and is the No. 1 ranked U.S. Park Skateboarder who will be representing her country at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. She lives in Encinitas.

Skateboarding is the one dream I’ve always had, even before I knew it enough to dream about it. It seems to be the indicator of who I really was and who I am to be later on. It is one of a kind, but paradoxically ignites all other kinds of dreams, too.

It is multifaceted, which is why you start to see the world in a limelight like no other. You don’t really have to fully get to know your best friends before you can be totally hooked and in love with all of them! Then the next day comes and you forget about yesterday, only to see a new shade of them today.

My role models include every single person who has contributed to my life because no one person is replicated. People like Mike McGill or Steve Caballero, who have inspired me by beaming out beacons of their legitimate selves. The Bones Brigade in “The Search for Animal Chin,” who made me first realize that skateboarding can build an interconnectivity like no other; they uncorked their biggest wishes and dreams through skateboarding. People like Oskar Rozenberg, who says few words before you hear the rumbles of his silent mantras his skateboarding sings. And Chris Pastras, whose heart is so big that he can build skateparks in it and tuck so many renditions of himself in there.

We are alive for the benefits of other people, it seems. I would love to be an addition to the previous renditions of skateboarding, as they have been to me. They inspire me by being their legitimate selves, the conductors of legitimacy.

Being your true authentic self is a leisurely activity everyone should try. Skateboarding brings it out involuntarily. Involvement in skateboarding makes me want to resurface all ordinary infrastructures. It puts skateboarding in a real limelight that comes from totally ejecting from your head and abiding by your heart — which means going wherever it tugs. If you really look at something through your own aurora borealis glasses, other people start to see it the same way. The world becomes less redundant, and scrapes and gnaws off superficiality.

Nowadays, it seems like the Olympics isn’t really just a competition, but rather a template for any being to create and manifest their destiny. To put your world on a platform for others to see. It will most likely feel like your clock is finally spinning counterclockwise rather than clockwise, and all of you will relapse back to when you were a newborn baby, where you could see the world without the contrivances of how others saw it.

When you’re indulging and sidestepping into your dream, anxiety kind of makes you play hopscotch a little. Clearly nerves are something that happen without your permission, and they kind of seep in when you wouldn’t want them to. But being at the Olympics is something that makes me not want to be nervous, because I’ve been looking towards this moment for two years. And focusing on a process or on how something needs to be done only excludes all of the wholesome beings that could maybe lurk inside of me! The uplifts, the downfalls, the scarce feelings that happen for a fraction of a second that jolt your whole being. You can lose fear just by approaching something the way you wouldn’t think about approaching it. You can ditch the part of you that cares about hiding behind a reputation.

You find after a while that wherever you go, there’s a leniency in skateboarding where it shouldn’t be so lenient, but it has always had that unshackling property about it. I never thought it would be an Olympic sport, and the Olympics is something you never knew skating could march its way into, but of course it did.

In regards to a child, a toddler, an elder relative, or really anyone who looks and gasps and gawks at how skateboarding is revealed to the public eye, they should be informed that what we’re doing is abiding by what it means to follow passion. Passion is something that develops after infatuation or being fond of something. But what looks like one can feel like another, and sometimes this goes hand and foot with who you are as a person.

Everyone should know that being inspired by skateboarding is a gift because in essence, you’re being inspired by countless spawnings and generations through the body of one human. Or flicker of one trick. Your dream can come true, just because you don’t think twice. You let yourself and your being chisel out something impeccable for the world.

So, go manifest your destiny. All it takes, is just wiping off smears of the shoulds or the musts. Inject the wants. You are a glimmering ray of a sunrise and a sunset, but for once let one surpass the other without abruptly reeling in the next thing. Be you, on your way to your moment. Maybe the Olympics will say hello on the way there.