Impostor Syndrome 3: Not Your Real Job

"Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to your brother's wedding. Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to school. That's your job. Your real job."

Ms. Marvel (2015) #6 (2016)

It's good cover art behind the bad lighting because I took this picture at midnight, promise.

One day sixteen-year-old Kamala Khan - aka Ms. Marvel: polymorph, masked hero, sworn protector of Jersey City, new recruit to the Avengers - gets a call from Iron Man. He's got a job for her to do: "Our Intel says a classified shipment of experimental neurotoxin has been stolen from the Port of Jersey City. That's your turf - you know it better than any of us. If you take care of it, Cap'll be putting gold stars next to your name on the team roster from here to eternity." 

Kamala is thrilled. She's one of the youngest and least experienced Avengers on the team, and this could be her chance to really prove herself: it is, as she says, exactly the opportunity she's been waiting for. So she heads off that evening to bust the bad guys. Unfortunately, though, she's not exactly on her best form: between preparations for her brother's upcoming wedding and the need to hike up her dipping marks at school to keep her parents happy, she's not been getting much sleep between her hero-ing jaunts. She slips up. She loses control of the situation. She ends up having to call in the other Avengers for backup.

"With everything that's going on, I feel like I'm always letting somebody down," laments her internal monologue. "And a lot of the time? That somebody is me." In the same panel, Thor reassures her, not terribly reassuringly: "It's all right. You did fine for someone so inexperienced." Ouch. Kamala starts to explain the situation, but Captain America cuts her off: "Thanks, Ms. Marvel. We'll take it from here. You do what you gotta do."

Ms. Marvel drops her gaze and turns away. "Oh. Okay." Her internal monologue elaborates: "They think I can't handle it. They don't realize how much stuff I'm dealing with outside of avenging. Home and school and everything - I want to be an Avenger. An Avenger. Not some super hero kid sister who can't clean up after herself."

Does this strike you as reminiscent of impostor syndrome at all? Kamala needs to call in backup one time because she's been pushing herself too hard to keep on top of everything, and that one little failure is this huge blow to her identity: it exposes that she's not a real Avenger, just the kid sister. She's not on the same level as the rest of them. They expect her to be present and correct for Avengers business whatever else is happening, and if she doesn't show them that she's capable of keeping up with their pace, they're going to realise that she doesn't deserve her place on the team.

The brilliant plan that Kamala comes up with to buy herself more time to focus on hero stuff and prove herself to her teammates is to create, with the help of her science-genius best friend Bruno, two polymer clones of herself to live the other bits of her life for her: one to go to school, and the other to attend all the social engagements happening in the lead-up to her brother's wedding. The clones aren't terribly sophisticated, but they look realistic and can repeat one or two prescribed phrases, which Kamala things should do the trick. Bruno's not so sure: "I'm kinda worried about your priorities, dude! Most people want to do well in school and show up at their brothers' weddings!"

Undeterred, Kamala sends the clones to their duties and sets off hero-ing - but then it turns out that that stolen neurotoxin that she tried to intercept down at the docks has contaminated her, and though it hasn't had any adverse effects on her personally thanks to her healing powers, it's engendered a rather unfortunate malfunction in the clones, that causes them to reproduce copies of themselves. Soon the city is swarming with clones. And there's also a giant mega-clone. And then Bruno makes a huge polymer Tyrannosaurus Rex to fight them, which doesn't help. And Bruno also summons Loki to fight the clones and … well, you get the picture, the whole thing is the most hilariously overblown chaotic mess.

Kamala knows she can't fix this by herself. She calls in backup, again - this time her inspiration and the former bearer of the Ms. Marvel title, Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, who sorts the whole thing out in a jiffy the way that Captain Marvel tends to do. And then they have a bit of a chat about how Kamala let things get so on top of her. Kamala has finally grasped the fact that she's been missing important stuff because she's been so preoccupied with living up to the Avengers' expectations of her. Carol, echoing Bruno's words from earlier, encourages her to prioritise: what will she be sorry she missed thirty years from now? Everything suddenly becomes a whole lot clearer.

But before Kamala can rush off to find her family at the latest pre-wedding do, Iron Man shows up, having gathered that something was amiss from the massive explosion when Captain Marvel got rid of the clones. Captain Marvel rebukes Iron Man for allowing Kamala to get so overworked, before heading off to deal with Loki. Iron Man turns to Kamala: "Spill it. Whatever it is. Otherwise you're gonna have to explain the whole thing to Patriot Pants, and you know how he is."

Kamala hesitates, but then admits the truth: "I - I need to be in school. Even if that means I sometimes have to skip out on Avengers-related stuff sometimes [sic]. And sometimes I really, really need to be with my family. Especially two Saturdays from now. My goofy brother is getting married. That's all."

"Oh, kid," responds Iron Man, pulling her into a hug. "This is what Google Calendars are for. Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to your brother's wedding. Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to school. That's your job. Your real job."

And yes, there's an important truth there about the need to take care of yourself and say no to some things and avoid burning out. But that's not the point I want to make from this. The point I want to make is that Kamala forgot what her real job was. The Avengers stuff was important, sure, but it wasn't the most important. It was a thing, but it wasn't the only thing - and she was behaving as if it were. She'd got to a point where she was going to let a polymer clone go in her place to her own brother's wedding because she was so consumed with the need to prove herself as an Avenger - to be Good Enough.

Good enough at what, though? What if being a good Avenger required her to be a bad sister, or a bad daughter, or a bad student? She got into this hero-ing business because she wanted to do the right thing, but then she let it become her whole identity, and that actually kept her from doing the right thing. It kept her from doing rightly by her family and her friends and her teachers and, actually, even her hero teammates, because she was pushing herself so hard that she wasn't putting in her best work with them, and even caused a total unnecessary clone catastrophe that she had to call in their help to get sorted.

So here's a question for you, dear reader: what's your real job?

Take as long as you need to ponder that one, though if you're a Christian and you haven't immediately jumped in with "following Jesus" or "seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness" or "glorifying God and enjoying him forever" or something to similar effect, I'd be a little worried. If you've committed to following Jesus, that really is your real job. No other priority tops that, not even family: he himself has explicitly said so.

At which point you may be ready to chastise yourself for having the wrong priorities, and do by all means toddle off and do some repenting if you're feeling convicted, but again, that's not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is that among those who follow Jesus there are, categorically, no impostors. I'm not talking about the visible church, I hasten to add - plenty of wolves in sheep's clothing hanging out there - but among those who have truly been born again of water and the Spirit, nobody is the kid sister who doesn't really deserve to be there. None of us in our natural state deserve to be there. But our natural state isn't our real identity. The prospect of being exposed for what we truly are holds no dread for us as Christians, because what we truly are is the very righteousness of Christ: God himself has wrought it and declares it so.

Following Jesus is our real job, and in that we have nothing to prove - nothing we could prove. You can't bring your impostor-syndrome perfectionism to the pursuit of holiness, because there God actually does demand perfection, of a standard you haven't the slightest shadow of a chance of ever achieving. Your only hope is Jesus' perfection freely given you through his death on the cross. Impostor syndrome tortures you with the promise that Good Enough is something attainable, though it'll never let you reach a point where you suppose you've attained it; it nurtures that pride, that need to show everyone else you can keep up and even excel at what you're doing. The gospel, on the other hand, confronts you with the fact that, before God, it's true that you're Not Good Enough - but that he loves you so much he purposed and executed the death of his beloved Son so that you wouldn't have to be. You don't have to be Good Enough, because Jesus is Good Enough and you're covered by his blood. If he's no impostor, then neither are you.

What's your real job? And what other priorities are you prone to mistaking for your real job? They probably won't be inherently bad things, any more than Kamala's Avenging was a bad thing; rather, they'll be good things that have persuaded you to ground your identity in them instead of where it belongs. Where do you feel the need to prove yourself? Because that need to prove yourself, much as it might feel like working hard and doing the right thing, is probably holding you back from doing the right thing with respect to your real job.

The ironic thing about Kamala's impostor syndrome was that, in her determination to prove herself a worthy Avenger, she send literal impostors to do the things that really mattered in her place. You can't be and do everything. If I might slightly misappropriate Jesus' comments about the love of money here, you can't serve two masters: you'll love one and hate the other. You'll see one as the identity that really matters and the other as some extra thing on the side. You'll freely offer your time to one and begrudge it to the other. You'll be fully present and correct in engaging with one and wish you had a polymer clone to send to the other in your place.

What's your real job? And what's not your real job? And if that thing's not your real job - not your most fundamental identity - then what real dread is there in being exposed as Not Good Enough at it? Set aside the pride that tells you you can do everything, and contemplate the predicament of sin you were in about which you couldn't do anything - which God redeemed you out of at the highest ransom-price ever paid. Know which Master you're serving, and that his yoke his easy, his burden light. Forget the need to prove yourself: he already proved himself in your place.

Impostor Syndrome 2: Sheer Dumb Luck

Lori:                 For half a second back there, I thought I saw a real human being.

Wallace:           Nobody asked me to be a human being. Why don’t we change it?

Lori:                 Change it?

Wallace:           What were you going to do with these? I’ll help you.

Lori:                 Why would you do that?

Wallace:           Because I’d much rather be a good guy.

Lori:                 You’re not just acting?

Wallace:           Well, we both are – in the Theatre of Life, I mean.

Lori:                 I suppose we are.

The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)

 

Spot any four-leaved ones? No, me neither.

One of my favourite films that nobody else seems to have heard of is a 1997 spy comedy called The Man Who Knew Too Little.¹ To my dismay, some perfunctory online searching reveals that the reason nobody else seems to have heard of it is probably because most people – or at least the proportion of ‘most people’ who are given to posting their opinions online – generally don’t rate it particularly highly: it gets 6.6/10 on IMDB, and a dismal 41% on Rotten Tomatoes. Much of the criticism levelled at the film seems to centre around the accusation that, in an hour and thirty-four minutes of runtime, it only really tells one joke, just over and over again in increasingly ridiculous permutations. And to be fair, I kind of can’t argue with that. There is only one joke. It just happens to be a joke that for some reason tickles me enormously.

The joke is this: when our hero Wallace Ritchie, a perfectly ordinary American chap who works at his local branch of Blockbuster, is treated to a live audience participation experience called the Theatre of Life by his rich brother in London, he accidentally picks up the wrong phone call and ends up embroiled in a very real international spy plot – all without ever developing the faintest idea that all the crazy things that are happening to him aren’t just part of the show. Impossibly convenient coincidence follows impossibly convenient coincidence to the point where everyone Wallace meets is convinced he’s some kind of unbeatable superspy, so adept that he can approach these matters of life and death, of betrayal and torture, of international turmoil and fabulous wealth, with laughter, brazen casualness, and irreverent tomfoolery. Among other things, Wallace somehow manages to use exactly the right words to convince the film’s villains that he knows all about their evil plot; to incapacitate two of their goons even while he’s tied to a chair;² and to disarm the bomb they’ve hidden in a matryoshka doll at an ambassadors’ reception while performing as part of a Russian folk-dancing troupe. For the first part of the film, you keep wondering when the penny’s going to drop, but after a while it occurs to you that maybe it just won’t – and it doesn’t. Even after the foiling of the evil plot is all done and dusted, right before the credits roll, as Wallace and his new girlfriend Lori are relaxing on a tropical beach, he manages to unwittingly knock out an assailant who was bringing him a poisoned drink as part of a recruitment test by a secret agency. So yes, all right, there’s only one joke, but I for one think that that joke has enough about it to carry the film comfortably home into the ninety-fourth minute. The massive incongruity between what Wallace thinks is going on – nothing more than some fun theatrics – and what everyone around him knows is going on – real, high-stakes, life-and-death, fate-of-the-world-in-our-hands kind of stuff – just keeps on yawning ever wider. The totally unbelievable coincidences just stack up higher and higher on top of each other as if the filmmakers had a bet on as to how many they could cram in. It’s hilarious.

And the reason it’s hilarious, of course, is because it’s ridiculous. It’s a million miles outside the realm of real-world plausibility that someone as ignorant and incompetent as Wallace should somehow succeed again, and again, and again, in tasks that sit way outside his capabilities. Wallace, in other words, is a true impostor. He’s an exaggerated version of what someone suffering from impostor syndrome thinks she is – moving in circles he’s not really qualified to move in, somehow pulling off one impressive achievement after another without really deserving to, being thought of by everyone around him as vastly more accomplished at this business than he really is. Ironic, then, that while Wallace is the very essence of impostor-ness distilled, he hasn’t the faintest awareness of the fact; whereas the impostor-syndrome sufferer worries about the exposure of a secret impostor identity that she doesn’t even really have – that she can’t really have, because it would simply be outside the realm of real-world plausibility that she should have somehow succeeded again, and again, and again, if she weren’t genuinely capable of the tasks at hand.

But I’ve already tried to knock the impostor syndrome out of you by drawing your attention to how ridiculous the whole thing is, so I’m not going to leave the matter there today. There is, after all, another way of looking at Wallace’s unbelievable series of spectacular successes. If, indeed, he is somehow endowed with the ability to generate these ludicrous coincidences – if he truly has the superpower of sheer dumb luck – then is he really an impostor at all? Or is he just displaying a rather unorthodox form of competence? He did, at the end of the day, foil an international bomb plot almost single-handed, and his mysterious powers don’t appear to have waned at all afterwards either. If it turns out he can keep that up, well, is it not then fair to say that he really is some kind of amazing superspy? Is it not then justified for those around him to recognise him as such? Does it not make good sense to give him a top position in the field and send him out to do his thing?

You might counter that, even so, he doesn’t really deserve the admiration he garners; he hasn’t, after all, ever worked or trained or even tried to gain expertise in the field of espionage. But is that really the point? Some people have natural talents (even if in the real world they never exist to quite the same degree as Wallace’s talent at being lucky); are such people not to be considered skilled when they exercise those natural talents? And can we really claim so much of the credit for ourselves even when it comes to the skills that we have put work in to acquire? I think, for instance, of my own high proficiency in various dead languages: the series of fortunate happenstances that permitted me to gain that proficiency was long and unlikely, and I can hardly claim the credit for, say, the fact that my secondary school just happened to run a one-off programme of after-school AS-level Latin in my final year there, or the irresolvable timetable clash in my first year of university that landed me in a Biblical Hebrew class³ – any more than Wallace can claim the credit for his own relentlessly improbable strokes of good fortune.

I’m not saying that hard work isn’t worth something or that there’s no virtue in rewarding it, but the fact remains that God, in his providence, ordains certain natural talents and life experiences and manners of thinking for each of us, that we did nothing to deserve or earn. On the one hand, you absolutely didn’t attain to the position you’re in due to an extended catalogue of fortunate flukes for which you weren’t responsible, because that’s ridiculous and doesn’t happen in the real world; but on the other hand, you absolutely did attain to the position you’re in due to an extended catalogue of divine decisions for which you weren’t responsible. You are where you are because God wants you there. He has his plan for the universe and he’s given you your role in it. How on earth, then, can you be an impostor in that role, if it’s been divinely apportioned to you?

Now, obviously there are such things as real impostors: if you lied in the application form or the interview, don’t think I’m sanctifying that back to you. My point is that the competence that legitimately won you the position you’ve got was never really yours anyway: God gave you it, and you’ll have it to whichever degree he desires you to have it, for however long he desires you to have it, so as to fulfil whichever purpose he desires thereby to fulfil. In that sense, it’s kind of no better, no more virtuous, than sheer dumb luck. Why agonise, then, over which of them it was that brought you to where you are? Why not rather receive the earthly positions and privileges you’re given with gratitude, and hold them lightly, and refuse to rest your identity on them, knowing that God gives and takes away all these things and does so for his glory?

You don’t need to dread being exposed as Not Good Enough to be where you’re at, because God won’t fail to give you such competence as his plans require you to have. And you’re not actually entitled to any more than that. Doesn’t this, like so many things, at the end of the day come back to pride? The fear of being exposed as Not Good Enough stems from a felt need to prove oneself Good Enough, which is rather self-elevating and not actually terribly reflective of the things God encourages his children to prioritise. But I’ll leave a proper examination of that issue for my next post.

Wallace Ritchie is the most impostor-y of impostors, and yet on another level he isn’t an impostor at all. By comparison with the first state of affairs, you know that the idea of you being an impostor is ridiculous; and by comparison with the second, you know that there can be no impostors if everything, be it hard-won skill or sheer dumb luck, is ultimately a gift of God that he has apportioned as he has chosen in his sovereignty. And so you can be assured that you, O Appropriately Gifted Reader, are nothing less than exactly as good as you need to be.⁴

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a trailer to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YAhpfcdx0U.

² Some kind human has gifted YouTube with a really high-quality version of the relevant clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42VFO2Zqp0.

³ I got rather good at Hebrew, as you’ll gather, and actually taught an intermediate module in it this year – a mere five years after I’d taken the same module myself. We use Lily Kahn’s excellent textbook: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Introductory-Course-in-Biblical-Hebrew-1st-Edition/Kahn/p/book/9780415524803.

⁴ I do feel as if I ought to provide some sort of scriptural evidence for my argument here, but the point that God is sole master over everything that happens in the universe is just such a given in scripture that I kind of don’t know where to point you. How about some anti-idolatry satire from Isaiah, just because it’s very good fun? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+46&version=ESVUK I draw your attention especially to verses 10 and 11.

Impostor Syndrome 1: Consider This

Blackadder:    I then leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked if he’d been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, or Hull … You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities.

Melchett:         That’s right; Oxford’s a complete dump!

Blackadder:    Well, quite. No true Englishwoman could have fallen into that trap.

Blackadder Goes Forth E5, ‘General Hospital’ (1989)

I want to talk about impostor syndrome.

 

Nice excuse to have a cool-looking mask as the post cover picture.

I want to talk about how stupid and pointless it is, not so much because I personally think it’s stupid and pointless (though I do) as because I think we all of us know that it’s stupid and pointless, and yet somehow it persists among us even as we acknowledge the fact. I want to talk about it because I so often hear someone in an academic context mention how real and prevalent the thing is, and see her statement met with ubiquitous nods and knowing murmurs of agreement – and so it is revealed that we’re all sitting there believing ourselves impostors. I want to talk about it because I seem to recall that I to no negligible extent experienced it at one stage, but now I just sort of don’t that much any more, and so it seems reasonable to suppose that if I ramble about the matter for a while in light of my own experience, the resulting series of little treatises might possibly be of some help to any of you who hope to chart a similar course.

To provide a brief sketch of the necessary context, the idea of the impostor phenomenon was apparently introduced by Drs. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in a 1978 article dealing with high-achieving women.¹ The participants in the study, though all extremely competent and talented as far as the gatherable evidence went, attributed their successes to luck, and to other people imagining them to be more capable than they actually were. Someone with impostor syndrome, then, believes that she isn’t really good enough to have achieved as much as she has, and that the people around her are deceived to think that she is; she is persistently afraid of being exposed as a fraud. (The phenomenon has since been found by other studies to be common among men as well.)

Impostor syndrome is the voice that tells you that everyone else in the room undoubtedly knows heaps more about the subject at hand than you do, and you can’t possibly open your mouth to join the discussion because then they’ll all realise what an idiot you are. It’s the voice that tells you that that latest addition to the slew of first-class grades you’ve been accruing is just another fluke; the marker was generous, or you just so happened to hit on something he liked, or the rest of the cohort did badly and your own grade was moderated upwards by comparison, or whichever scenario it might be that you envision in order to deny the quite obvious truth that you’re pretty damn good at this. It’s also having got so used to being the cleverest kid in the class at primary school that, once you progress to university and beyond, anything less than that – first-class mark or not – still feels like failure, even though, logically, it should register with you that you’re moving into a smaller and smaller niche of extremely clever people, and being top of the one group is hardly comparable to being top of the other. Impostor syndrome is the knot of fear in your stomach when you get something wrong, because surely you’re only one more slip-up away from being exposed, and equally when you get something right, because every success only sets the precedent and the expectation more firmly and ramps up the pressure on you to continue to be lucky enough to meet it, or else compensate by working harder. It’s that desperate need to get everything right and do everything perfectly, because every mistake or deficiency, however small, demonstrates that you as a whole person are simply Not Good Enough. Impostor syndrome is being too afraid to ask for explanations when everyone starts talking with airy pretension about something you don’t understand, then rushing to claim your threatened place in the conversation by nodding sagely and talking with airy pretension as soon as it mercifully strays back onto territory you do understand.² It’s agonising over every word you speak or write lest you reveal yourself to be in some way less than your addressee imagined you were. It’s feeling personally wounded by constructive criticism, and resenting it, because you let negative comments about your work reach into your core perception of who you are in a way that you’d never come close to letting positive comments about it do. It’s knowing no way to receive a compliment other than by denying its veracity. It’s feeling guilty every time you get a better mark than your friend because you just don’t see how you deserve to.

Impostor syndrome is expecting perfection of yourself, and considering yourself a fraud undeserving of the position you hold whenever you fail to meet that impossible standard.

If you discern that in yourself at all, please take a moment to consider that the set of symptoms in question constitutes a distinct and recordable psychological phenomenon recognised by professionals in that field. Take a moment to consider also that the category has proved itself a relevant and helpful enough one to apply among the population at large to have worked its way firmly into mainstream discourse. Take a moment to consider, therefore, that a good proportion of the people in whose company you feel like an impostor, are feeling exactly the same way. Now take a moment, if you will, to consider how stupid and pointless that is.

I’ll delve deeper into particular aspects of impostor syndrome, and particularly how the gospel speaks to it, in my next couple of posts, but for now please take a moment to consider that if you feel like an impostor, you’re very much not the only one. And if, as it turns out, the room is full of self-perceiving impostors, who exactly is it that they’re all hoping to impress?³

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a more recent study summarising the salient points of the earlier research: https://www.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/IJBS/article/view/521/pdf.

² There’s an excellent bit in Miranda Hart’s Is It Just Me? where she suggests some strategies for coming across as intelligent in conversations you don’t understand: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Miranda-Hart/Is-It-Just-Me/14575608. See, as in so many things, it isn’t just you!

³ And before I go, a tip of the hat to Blackadder Scripts for helping me out with my opening quotation: http://allblackadderscripts.blogspot.com/2012/12/blackadder-iv-episode-5-general-hospital.html.