hey man, don't sweat it. the board and the streets will always be there. your body will change, but the skateboarding will always be there. there was a period in my late 20s where I wasn't skating much, mostly because I was getting too fucked up or trying to get fucked up and go skate and the sesh with a 40 and a blunt turned into a lot more than that and so it went the way of partying, but I always had a board. Then around 29, in 2014, my body started getting really wonky and I was living in the mountains, so skating couldn't really happen. I still got hyped on it and had a board but it was a shitty, shitty shop deck that made any attempt feel awful so, combined with the broken body and new found sobriety, I straight up stopped skating. I said I wasn't going to go skate just because I felt I had to go skate, like a chore. I stopped having a board in my car. Stopped referring to myself or thinking of myself as a skateboarder. I was bored and on the internet a lot for my new thing in grad school, so I made my first SLAP account since 2011 and start kinda thinking of skating again but still couldn't skate. Then in September 2020 I was out for a bike ride and snagged a big fat cruiser board that some tweaked out cat left in the bushes. Shit was like 10" with a 15wb, old ass venture 5.1 and soft wheels. I threw it in my whip for a cross country trip back home and decided to go skate the old spots. I had a lot of fun and just started trying to do some shit- I wasn't thinking about wheel base or softies and was totally getting smoked, but damn did it feel good. I drove back home a month later, stopped in the local shop, bought a standard 8.6 popsicle and some new 56mm Bones wheels, slapped em on some old Indy 149s and it's been a wrap since. Skating a few days a week, messing around with new shit, learning and having hecka fun times, learning more shit in a faster period than at any other time since I started playing with skateboards in 1996.
I got long here because a break was kind of the best thing I could have done to start enjoying skateboarding again. I am slower, less ballsy, and skate alone all the time, but it's the shit. take a break