How many stars do we carry without realizing it? My cousin and I once ravaged through the cold, cluttered basement, hunting for taped hockey sticks misplaced during the move. We planned to roll a rubber ball outdoors between makeshift laundry-bucket goalposts. Among the mess, a dust-covered digital piano sat tilted on dented cardboard boxes — the perfect distraction. My fingers instinctively pressed its keys, repeating the only six chords I’d ever learned. 

Our minds are quick to support these doubts. We start listing all the prerequisites we haven’t taken, all the students who have, all the New York Times articles* we haven’t read, and all the students who have. The comparisons become endless, and the more we focus on what we lack, the deeper we sink into the belief that we’re not enough.