The Power of Belief

I begged for a keyboard for 3 years. I was tired of stealing moments on the church piano before service. I always had to say goodbye too soon. 

Any piano I saw I had to touch it. And adults would routinely interrupt, trying to teach me kindergarten jingles, not realizing I had something different in me I was trying to let out.

Finally one Christmas my mom figured out how to help Santa gift me a Casio. 

I was 7.

I don’t remember the other presents from that year because the keyboard was the only thing in the room, to me. 

I remember moving my hands like I knew what I was doing. Flitting my little fingers all up and down the board. Free.

I have no idea if it sounded as good as it felt, but I remember my mom calling my dad on the phone while he was away on deployment. “You have to hear this.”

An air of surrender was in her voice. She was happy, and I imagine her feeling the weight of the question “how do I support her with this when I could barely afford the keyboard?”

I remember my father coming home and showing me he could play too. A lover of blues, he would bellow his big booming voice through the house while banging his big man hands on that tiny Casio. He was everything. 

And as girls do when their fathers are everything, I demanded he show me how to play his songs, and he did. Every single one.

By 12 years old I performed finale at recital, which is a private lessons way of saying “top of my class”. Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14, Moonlight. First movement—the popular one. The easier one. 

Three years later I’d learned the third movement. Far less popular, much more difficult. I had a fucking blast playing that thing.

People would express wonder about me playing over the years. I always felt confused at the questions.

“How do you play like that?” 

It’s just muscle memory and practice and a lot of patience, I’d respond.

Or, later, I started saying things like “You don’t learn to play piano. You learn to play a song. That’s it. One song. When you’re done, you learn the next one song.”

I still believe these things. I know it sounds arrogant or shortsighted or naïve in its simplicity. And maybe all of that is true. There is such a thing as talent.

But the more I mature my answer doesn’t become more nuanced or complex. Actually, I’ve noticed it simplifying further.

The plainest truth is that I learned to play the way I can because it never once occurred to me that maybe I couldn’t. 

Further, those shortsighted answers come from the fact that it never occurred to me that anyone with able hands “couldn’t” play piano. 

It’s tough for me to fathom this idea, even now. You could say the evidence is everywhere, in each person who can’t play a song. But I’ve never seen anyone who put in consistent effort come out the other end not being able to play what they practiced.

I’ve only seen people doubt themselves out of trying. Afraid to believe in themselves as if belief equates delusion, somehow.

So is there power in that? Not letting the self doubt creep in, eroding our sense of self-belief?

In my 30s I started to see TikTok videos of piano kids who didn’t need the “practice” part. 

They’d hear the song and start playing along. Clumsily at first, then smoothly after a few seconds. 

No sheet music. No repetition. No grueling practice hours. 

I was floored. Is this real? I couldn’t do that. It never occurred to me that I, or anyone else, could do that.

Maybe it’s all a hoax.

Or maybe it just never occurred to these kids that practice was necessary for playing. 

Maybe the whole truth is that just about anything you believe you can or can't do, you’ll be right about it in the end.

Tori