Let me tell you a little secret:

If you want to feel better about your ability to do something, surround yourself with people who can do said thing much worse than you.  Seriously, do it, and tell me how it makes you feel.
Oh, you did?  And it makes you feel awesome about yourself?  Told you.

Forget that stuff about surrounding yourself with talented people who will make you better.  It doesn't work, it just makes you compare yourself with those talented people, and then you feel like crap.  These things I am telling you...they're gold.  Write them down.

Oh yeah, that one time I was a rockstar.  Time travel back to the ninth grade.  Look at your keyboard, now back to me.  Again to your keyboard, now back to me.  See that skinny girl with long, brown, mousy hair and the very large nose?  Her name is Stephanie. She's alright, though you wouldn't know it to look at her.  Or talk to her.  But she is, trust me.

Well, as luck would have it, she decided to take a guitar class.  Because, well, she was interested in learning how to play the guitar.  Because guitars are cool!  Also, she wanted to get out of doing another lame choir class, and this was her out.

The guitar class was taught by the orchestra teacher, who was, as far as teachers go, a pretty cool dude.  He was sarcastic, made them listen to Van Morrison songs, and attempted to teach them how to play the guitar until he got frustrated and went to his office to "watch them while they practiced" how to get their fingers into the right position to play a D-chord.  It's amazing how something so simple can be so dang difficult that you just end up berating yourself, because you should be able to get your fingers to the right strings in less than the 30 seconds and a couple of knuckle cracks that it does actually take you to get them there.  Anyway, where was I? 

Oh, yes.  Steph sat in the front, right next to this tall lanky kid who died his hair black and got uncomfortably close to her when he talked.  And what did he unfailingly talk about?  Pot.  Yeah, it was "pot this" and "pot that" and how everyone in the world should do pot because it is amazing and it makes you so much smarter.  When Stephanie pointed out that pot was a drug and (as she learned from Ms. Beyers in the fifth grade) that we shouldn't do drugs, he scoffed at her like she was some sort of imbecile. 

"Duh, Stephanie.  Pot isn't a drug--it's a PLANT.  It's completely natural."  he said to her, rolling his red, bloodshot eyes, "Want some?" 

"Ugh, no thanks" she replied as she returned to moving her pinky to the most awkward position possible.

Later on in the year they were assigned a project.  They were to perform a song in front of the rest of the class, to showcase their minuscule guitar skills and allow everyone to laugh at them.  Stephanie took this assignment very seriously, as she did all of her assignments (but that's an entirely different story).  She agonized over what song to choose that would be easy enough to play, but showcase her voice and rockstarish qualities.  She finally settled on a song by Jewel that was semi-popular at that time.

The long awaited day came, and Stephanie was ready.  She listened to her peers as they plunked out the chords to Mary Had a Little Lamb and other songs from the Intro to Guitar textbooks.  Ha!  Songs from the textbook!  She was above all that...or so she hoped.

When the pot boy next to her finally ended his painful rendition of I'm a Little Tea Pot, it was her turn.  She quickly looked over tabs, then took a deep breath.  She played beautifully.  She was able to hit all of her chords, her strumming hand wasn't too shaky that she didn't at least get the rhythm semi-decent, and she sang the song like it was written for her.  She reveled in the moment--the awed looks from her peers, the impressed look from her teacher.

When she was finished she let the last note linger on the air for a few moments, before the room broke out into applause.  And it did!  Ten to fifteen high school pairs of hands semi-languidly clapped their approval and in that moment, she knew what it felt like to be a rockstar.  The florescent lights almost blinded her as she looked into the distance, enjoying her moment of fame.  She nodded her head in acknowledgment of their praise, first to the right, then to the left.  She felt regal and respected.

Then the boy behind her started to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the room faded back into the dimly lit, dirty orchestra room that smelled like old coffee, dirty adolescent boys and pot.  She remembered that she was Stephanie and so returned to her feeling of unimportant invisibility.  But for that one moment, she had been something.  Really something.  And she never forgot it.