I was born in Poland in 1971 and the doctors gave me a day. My family called the priest, and he came and did what priests do for the dying. Then morning came and I was still here.
It kept happening like that.
At four I had a piece of beef stuck in my throat and a neighbour ran in and hooked it out with her finger.
At about eleven I was buried in a sand tunnel I’d dug myself, and my friend spotted one shoe and pulled.
At fifteen I was asleep in the back of the car when something woke me and told me to move over, so I shifted across without asking why, and thirty seconds later the door I’d been leaning on came half a metre in.
Somebody was looking after me, and I’ll not pretend I know who.
Underneath all of it I believed I can’t, and that’s what I got, because you expect the worst and wait for it and it turns up on time.
Music is where it showed first. All I wanted was to play properly, and I asked for lessons as a boy and they told me to come back when I was older. When I came back they said I’d left it late to catch the ones who started at five. I played my audition, proper classical pieces with months of work in them, and the examiners wrote down that I’d played songs and chords. Later I passed the university exam, one of four, with a single place going, and it went to somebody else. I teach guitar and piano now, so I got there in the end, years after I meant to.
I came to England with a Polish degree in finance that counted for nothing here, so I started again on a factory floor running a machine. A few years in they told us half the shift was going. Everybody else took the redundancy and ran, while I walked round the site at dinner time saying daft things to myself about being exactly where I needed to be, and they thought I’d lost it. Six months later there was a job that had never existed before, and I sat for it in the same office where I’d once signed a warning, in the same chair.
That’s what turned it, choosing what I believe on purpose, out loud, even when I didn’t believe a word of it yet. And here’s why that matters to you and not only to me. We all run on beliefs and most of them are miserable, because miserable is easy. You hear about somebody turning their life around and you think, good for them, not me, and that’s the program talking. You can rewrite it, though rewriting takes doing something, and doing something takes energy, and the energy comes out of what you’ve decided to believe.
It’s slow, mind, because undoing a belief takes about as long as building it did. So don’t sit waiting for the whole lot to turn over, when a bit better is already better.
I won’t lie to you. Believing doesn’t make a thing true, and my mum believed and she died anyway. Some days I’ve nothing left in me and the old voice walks straight back in, and I still get those days.
The help always came through people, and I only started seeing them once something in me had moved first. Who sent them, I don’t know.
Morning and night I say the same thing three times. Thank you for keeping me safe, thank you for looking after me, and that’s the whole of it.
These apps are me doing that, and the books are the same thing written down. The apps and the library stay free. The books I’m asking you to buy.
I can, because I believe I can.
Trebor Chawie
