Day 12 (Part 1): Lostwithiel — Words Matter

A quick update before today’s blog: the replacement part for the VOK has now arrived. I also had to buy a laptop so the VOK technicians can remotely access the bike, complete the setup and make sure everything is working properly. Once that has been done, I should finally be ready to get moving again.

Yesterday I finished by saying that boundaries had changed the way I think about support.

The truth is, they changed the way I think about trust.

For most of my life, I’ve heard people tell me they loved me, supported me or would always be there for me. Over time, I realised those words didn’t always mean what I thought they meant.

Sometimes support came with conditions. Sometimes it disappeared when life became difficult. I don’t think that made me cynical, but it did make me cautious. I stopped assuming that words and actions naturally belonged together.

Over the last seventeen months, though, I experienced something I had rarely known with any consistency before: somebody whose actions repeatedly matched their words.

That changed me, not because somebody else changed who I was, but because I finally realised this kind of trust actually exists.

When somebody consistently does what they say they will do, it changes more than your trust in them. It changes the standard you hold yourself to as well. You become more careful about the promises you make, more honest about what you can and cannot do, and more determined that your own words deserve the same trust you have been given.

Trust became unbreakable because neither of us expected words to do the work of actions. Consistency did.

One of the experiences that completely changed how I understood that happened in Whitby.

When my van was impounded and only days away from being crushed, I wasn’t looking for sympathy or encouraging comments. I wasn’t looking for people to tell me they believed in me.

I needed practical help, not just for myself, but for Tom and three dogs who suddenly had nowhere to go.

I heard the same phrases again and again.

“I’d like to help, but…”

“I wish I could help, but…”

“I’m here if you need me…”

Every sentence seemed to come with a “but.”

People did not owe me anything, and I understand that everyone has their own circumstances and limitations. What I struggled to understand was how somebody could say they supported me while always finding a reason that support could not become action when it was genuinely needed.

Whitby also became one of the hardest moments of my recovery.

In the middle of all that uncertainty, somebody offered me ketamine. There was a time in my life when I probably would have said yes.

Instead, I found myself thinking about everything that had happened during the previous months. While I was feeling overwhelmed, somebody 4,400 miles away refused to give up every time another problem appeared.

She wasn’t giving up on me, and I wasn’t prepared to give up on myself.

Not because somebody told me what to do, but because I had reached a point where I understood that my decisions no longer affected only me. I couldn’t do that to myself, and I couldn’t do it to the future we were building together.

After weeks of “I’d like to help, but…”, the van was finally released, loaded onto a transporter and hauled back to me..

That wasn’t the moment I stopped believing people cared about me. It was the moment I realised that caring and supporting are not always the same thing.

Support is not measured by what somebody says when life is going well. It is measured by what they consistently choose to do when it isn’t.

At the end of the day, the support that I needed did not come from five miles down the road. It came from 4,400 miles across the Atlantic.

Since then, I have paid much closer attention to the difference between words and actions.

People often tell me they miss watching my livestreams. They tell me they support what I am doing and wish they could still watch me play.

After my Facebook account was hacked, I had to rebuild on TikTok because it was the platform I needed to grow and the place where I could begin recovering what had been taken away.

Nobody owed me a download, and nobody was obligated to follow me there. But I noticed that when somebody says they miss you while making no effort to find you on the platform where you are trying to rebuild your future, their words and actions begin telling two different stories.

That does not make them bad people. It simply taught me not to assume that words automatically become actions.

Support is not always measured by how loudly somebody celebrates your success. Sometimes it is measured by who quietly stands beside you when there is nothing to celebrate.

I have also realised how often conversations become trapped in the past.

There is nothing wrong with remembering where somebody started, but there is something deeply discouraging about having every conversation pulled back to the person you were years ago.

So many conversations begin with, “Remember when…”

I do remember.

I remember addiction, struggling and making mistakes. I remember the version of me who was not ready to finish what he had started. Not all of those memories are good, but I also know how much work has happened since then.

At some point, remembering the past stops being connection and starts becoming a refusal to see the present.

Conversations drift back to the addict people met in a train station, the person they once helped or the mistakes I made, as though those chapters matter more than everything that came afterwards.

I am genuinely grateful to every person who helped me when I needed it, and I would not rewrite those moments. But helping somebody through one chapter of their life does not make you the author of the chapters that follow.

Nobody else owns my recovery.

Recovery was not one conversation, one act of kindness or one person. It has been thousands of ordinary decisions made when nobody was watching.

The work had already begun before any of this.

I had already decided to understand myself better, to stay clean and to build a future instead of simply surviving another day. What changed was not who I was. It was that, for the first time, I experienced a relationship where growth was encouraged rather than feared.

I was not expected to remain the same person so somebody else could continue relating to the version of me they first met. I was not constantly reminded of my worst days or judged by my past whenever I tried to move forward.

I was accepted as I was while being encouraged to keep becoming the person I wanted to be.

There is a huge difference between somebody trying to change you and somebody supporting your decision to grow. Nobody else did the work for me, and nobody else gets credit for the choices I made. But experiencing consistency showed me that trust could be something more than a promise.

It could be a pattern.

That lesson has shaped the way my business partner and I have built PianoManOfficial and the PianoMission.

We made a commitment very early on that our words would mean something. We would not promise what we were not prepared to deliver. If we said we would do something, we would do everything reasonably possible to make it happen. If circumstances changed and we could not, we would have an honest conversation rather than make excuses. Not only to each other, but to all of you as well.

Experiencing that kind of trust and consistency did not just change how I trusted somebody else. It changed the standard I wanted to hold myself to.

If I tell somebody I will do something, I want them to know I will do everything reasonably possible to follow through. If I cannot, I want to be honest enough to say so. I cannot expect somebody else’s words to carry weight if I am not prepared to make sure mine do too.

Today, I still believe words matter. In fact, I think they matter more than ever, which is exactly why they should be backed by action.

Promises build hope.

Consistency builds trust.

I have stopped measuring support only by what people tell me. I measure it by what they consistently do, and perhaps more importantly, I have started holding myself to the same standard.

Tomorrow, I want to explain why all of this matters.

The last seventeen months were not simply about rebuilding myself. They were about building something that I hope will continue changing lives long after I can no longer push a piano around Britain.

Because the greatest things we build in life are rarely only for ourselves.

They are for the people who come after us.

— James

Day 12 Counter
Lostwithiel to Liskeard to Plymouth
Miles travelled: 33.3
Average speed: 11.8
Elevation gain: 2952 ft
Elevation loss: 2932 ft
Locations busked: 0

Journey Total
Total miles travelled: 122.6
Total locations busked: 6