If you still haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame, fret not!
This post is completely free of spoilers.

Though I normally see Marvel movies within a week or two of their openings, it took me roughly a month and a half to see Endgame due to my work/ministry/life schedule. It was well worth the wait. I’m still digesting many parts of the film, but over all, I loved it as a culmination to ten years of Marvel storytelling. Amid all the great quips and crowd-pleasing one-liners throughout Endgame, there’s one poignant quote which has stuck with me days after the first viewing experience. At perhaps Thor’s lowest emotional point in this decade-long franchise, after seemingly losing everything and being beaten down again and again, the thunder god hears these words:

Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be….
The measure or a person, of a hero,
is how well they succeed at being who they are.

I cannot begin to say how much I love this line. In fact, next to “With great power comes great responsibility,” this might be my new favorite line of dialogue from a superhero film, and I’ll probably print it up and hang it on my desk as a constant reminder. In particular, the quote reminds me of a Wild Goose Festival sermon by Nadia Bolz-Weber where she suggested our most dangerous idols are not the popular ones like fame and fortune; they’re the idealized versions of ourselves.

We all have them: the versions of ourselves we wish we were,
the ones who have their lives figured out,
who have their shit together,
who effectively balance work and relationships
and still make it to the gym three times a week,
the ones whose checkbooks are balanced,
whose appearances are effortlessly maintained,
and whose diets consistently feature leafy green vegetables—
yeah, everyone has some variation of this perfect self who does not (and cannot) exist.
And we idolize these hypothetical selves;
they’re graven images who we will never become
but who we always feel pressured to be,
and as we worship them and sacrifice to them,
we beat ourselves down for not being them.

Thor carries this same burden into Avengers: Endgame. He sees himself as a failure for not meeting his own exorbitant expectations of himself, but Thor (like us) must learn we can never be those perfect supposed-to-be selves. We will always fail, but there’s good news here too.
You see, you are human, and failure is part of our human condition,
but heroism isn’t about not failing;
it’s about failing, learning from it, and getting up again.
Heroism is being the real you
(not the supposed-to-be you who you could never be anyway).
And so, there’s a strange liberation in having license to fail,
so long as, in our failures, we allow ourselves to grow into better versions of ourselves
instead of hopelessly comparing ourselves to impossible versions of us.

So let go of the idol of the supposed-to-be you.
Give yourself the permission to mess up and get back up.
There’s freedom in failure.
And it’s only through failing
that we succeed at being
who we really are.

Hey, if you enjoyed this post, definitely check out Avengers: Endgame, but you may also want to pick up a copy of Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, which deals heavily with our responses to failure.