The Other Video

One night, scrolling on her mum's phone before bed, curled up under her blanket with just the bedside lamp on, Sam found a video of a girl about her own age, dancing bhangra in a competition, wearing a sparkly costume, absolutely perfect, not one shoulder pop out of place. Every move landed exactly on the beat, the way Sam's still didn't, not quite. The comments underneath were full of clapping emojis and words like amazing and incredible and she's a STAR.

Sam watched it three times, and each time she felt a little smaller than the time before, like the video was somehow shrinking her just by existing.

"I'll never be that good," she told her mum, handing back the phone like it had gotten too heavy to hold.

"That girl's probably been dancing since she could walk," her mum said, glancing at the screen for a second before setting the phone face-down on the nightstand. "And she's in the third shop — remember what Amrit said? The theatre shop, with the costumes and the judges. That's not even the shop you're in."

"I know. It still made me feel bad, though."

Her mum sat down on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping slightly under her weight. "Can I tell you something I used to forget all the time when I was your age? You can admire somebody's talent without it being a measurement of whether you're allowed to enjoy your own. That girl being amazing at the theatre shop doesn't subtract one single thing from what you're building in the fourth shop. Different shops don't compete with each other."

Sam thought about that for a while, lying back on her pillow, staring at the little glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to her ceiling from years ago. "So I don't have to be as good as her."

"You don't have to be as good as anybody except the version of you from last Saturday. That's the only fair comparison there is." Her mum kissed her forehead and turned off the lamp — the same lamp, still slightly crooked no matter how many times Sam straightened it. "Goodnight, bhangra girl."

Sam smiled into the dark, and for the first time all evening, the sparkly costume video didn't feel like something to measure herself against. It just felt like a nice video, in a different shop, that had nothing to do with hers at all.