"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)
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| 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.
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