What did it take to make that shift? Mostly it came from starting to help the other girls. In the beginning, every time the camera turned on and I was standing on the drop-in ramp, I wanted to sink into the snow and disappear. It was hard to believe in myself since nobody else did. I could see that same look on their face when [other women] were standing up there: the self-doubt. I heard myself saying to them, “I’ve seen you land stuff be-fore. You can do it! What makes you think you can’t do it?” Long before The Uninvited became a thing, I was doing the un-derground Uninvited —it just didn’t have a name or structure. When I got my second free board, my first one went to a girl who needed one. When I got my travel budget, I would invite girls who didn’t have one to stay in my hotel room, take a seat in my rental car, or use my filmer to get some shots. I’d use my [airline] points to fly girls out to come film with me. I really felt like I didn’t deserve all that success. All that money I was making, I tried to give it away. I’d buy everyone din-ner, buy the diggers at Hood $1,000 of alcohol and then bake them a cake. But when I saw the girls losing faith in themselves and I was telling them, “You are landing stuff because you can, and you are here because you deserve it,” that’s when I was like, “Oh, maybe I am too.” By then, I was so messed up physically from never taking a break. I had a couple of surgeries where the surgeons were like, “It looks like you got in a car accident. I’m going to speak about your case at our next conference.” I’d had a lot of torn ligaments, too many concus-sions, a lacerated liver, broken ribs, bruised vertebrae, sprained ev-erything, two broken arms at once along with a blown knee… I kept riding through all those injuries. I would never stop. I think the most I ever took off was six weeks. I thought that if I stopped, I would lose any progress I had made, that the guys would continue to just laugh at us. I felt like people were finally starting to listen. I thought if I let off the gas for a second, they’d be like, “See? Girls don’t know how to be hard workers.” I thought I needed a hundred shots to be in a movie because I’d seen women get cut out of film projects for all sorts of lame excuses. I wanted to make sure they had no option other than to include me. It sounds like you got conditioned to hardly believe in yourself and as a result had so much to prove… I didn’t have a victim mentality, but I had a sense that everything I had earned was going to be taken away if I didn’t bleed for it every single day. After working construction, I had a sense of what my life was go-ing to be like if I didn’t make it. That gave me another kind of work ethic. You have to starve to know what hunger is. That knowledge is what drove me for so long. You also realize how to treat other people when you’ve been treated badly yourself. It’s like, “How’s this person doing? Are they bummed? Am I making them feel important? Am I doing the right thing with all this shit that I’ve been given?” Are you? Fuck yeah [laughter]. I can definitely sleep at night. I really try to treat people the way I wish I would have been treated. You’ve been talking about all these experiences where people kind of brushed you off. How do we change that, at least in snowboarding? It’s changing right now. They can only hold us back for so long. There have been little cracks that people have snuck through, like Women’s Big Air at the Olympics [in 2018]. They ran the Slopestyle event in the worst possible conditions, so the girls just ate shit and were barely able to land their most basic tricks. But for Big Air, the conditions were different, and everyone who watched it was sitting there with their mouths hanging open. They couldn’t believe how high the level of riding actually was, especially after watching the slopestyle disaster. All this talent was being bred underneath the surface and there was finally a crack for it to leak out of. And it was more of an eruption. Really, the way to make change is through actions, not words, not preaching. If someone was filming on a quarterpipe and they wouldn’t point their camera at me, I would huck a double backflip and land almost on top of them and be like, “Yo, you see me now?” We just need a chance to show them. That’s what The Uninvited is for. After the first movie came out, Maria [Thomsen] got asked to film for X Games Real Snow [in 2019] against the guys, for the first time in history. She placed second in fan favorite. Then Kennedi [Deck] gets signed to K2 and Vans and she’s filming for the Vans video. These are the girls who had ender and opener, and the results were immedi-ate. They just needed someone to give them a chance to be seen. I started The Uninvited after I was cut out of a high-profile project [in 2016]. I had planned to finally take a season off and get some sur-geries that were long overdue. But they asked me to film for this movie, so I skipped the surgeries and busted my ass all winter to film what I thought was one of my best parts ever. My name was on the billing for the movie, all the marketing and ads and stuff. I didn’t find out I wasn’t even in it until it premiered in Vancouver. I didn’t even know there was an event there until my friends called me from the venue saying, “We came here to see your part. Why aren’t you in it?” I wasn’t invited to the premiere. I wanted to quit snowboarding after that. I had bled for that part. I had caused permanent damage to my body for it, and it felt like it was for nothing. Finally I was like, “Give me the footage if you’re not going to use it.” I put it out on my own Vimeo channel and it still won Video Part of the Year. It was a big realization. If this was still happening to me at that level, where was the hope for the girls still on their way up? About a week after that happened, I ran into Darrah [Reid-McLean] and Maria [Thomsen] at the Full Moon premiere in Whistler and asked them if they would film for a project if I made one. I told them it was gonna be called The Uninvited because we’re never invited. I didn’t have to ex-plain the name because they already knew. There were tons of chicks in the past that nobody ever heard about who were sick street riders, but they quit because they knew there was no hope for them—they didn’t see anyone like them having any success no matter how good they were. They were like, “Why would I do this? It hurts. It costs me money. It makes it so I can’t work full time in the winter and I’m fuck-ing up at school.” In the end they just needed a chance to show what they could do. 080 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 18.4: Page 80
