Your roots don’t have to hold you down.
I want to begin there, with that sentence, because I spent most of my twenties believing the opposite. Not loudly. There was no manifesto, no dramatic renunciation of Sengera. The belief was quieter than that. It lived in the way I softened the Kisii accent when I introduced myself in Kansas, and in how I answered questions about home with a story so compressed it held no air. “Western Kenya, near Lake Victoria, small village.” Next topic. I had developed a skill for summarizing my entire origin into the length of a handshake. Efficient. Airless. Something like shame wearing the costume of brevity.
My father Raphael would have found this bewildering. Not unkindly. He had the gift of curiosity about his own roots, the way a man can love his village without needing to defend it. He knew which soil grew the best maize and which did not, and that knowing was not provincial pride, it was intimacy with a specific piece of the earth. When I left Sengera for Moi University in Eldoret, then Harvard, then the University of Kansas, then Illinois, I told myself I was expanding. In some ways I was. In other ways I was shedding.
The problem with roots is not that they hold you. The problem is when you cannot tell the difference between a root and a rope.
A root feeds. It carries water to the tree from depths the leaves will never see. Pull the tree from its roots and the tree does not become more free. It becomes slower. Disoriented. Taller things require deeper roots, not shallower ones. You cannot build a thirty-floor building on the foundation of a garden shed. The physicists and the engineers know this. The architects know this. The cardiologist who spent his formative years trying to lighten his cultural luggage knew it eventually, though it took him longer than it should have.
John Berry, the psychologist who mapped what happens to people when they move between cultures, described four possible postures in 1997: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization (Berry 1997, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, DOI: 10.1177/0022022197281011). His work, subsequently supported by decades of acculturation research, is rated Solid on the Honesty Scale, replicated across dozens of populations and contexts. The assimilated person adopts the new culture and releases the old. The integrated person holds both. The separated person holds the old and declines the new. The marginalized person loses both and is held by neither. Berry’s data, and the data of those who followed him, is fairly consistent on outcomes: integration correlates with better psychological health than assimilation, separation, or marginalization. The person who holds both currencies fares better. Not always. Not uniformly. But reliably enough to be called a pattern.
I had been attempting assimilation, thinking I was doing the sensible thing. The sensible cardiologist, well-dressed, well-spoken, credentialed in the American idiom. I had become fluent in a thousand small acts of self-translation. I translated my name from Chopu to Job, from the Ekegusii the village gave me to the English the application forms required. I translated my humor, my cadences, my food preferences at department dinners, my instinct to greet people the long way, with inquiry about family, the way you do in Kisii when you meet someone you respect. None of this was imposed. I participated. That is the complicated part.
The question was never whether to engage the new. The question was whether engaging the new required abandoning the old. And the answer, which I had not clearly arrived at in my thirties, is: it does not.
I have a colleague, another physician, who was born in Nairobi and trained in London. She carries both. She does it with something close to elegance, the way a person carries two passports without confusion about which country is theirs. She does not perform Kenyan-ness for Kenyan audiences and perform British-ness for British ones. She is both, legibly, without apology or explanation. I watched her for a year before I understood what I was watching. She had not chosen a root. She had grown two.
The engako, that calm pocket of water I grew up understanding as the still eddy behind a large rock in a rushing river, is found precisely by people who have not cut themselves free of everything that anchors them. The fish that survives the torrent is not the one that has surrendered all grip. It is the one that knows which rock to hold and when to release. This is not a metaphor the village invented for motivational purposes. It is how the river actually works.
You may honor where you come from without being frozen there. These are not the same action. Frozen is: refusing to adapt, insisting the village was right about everything, carrying resentment of every new thing simply because it is new. Honoring is: knowing the specific names of the people who shaped you, tasting the memory of obokima without needing to eat it every day, carrying the moral instruction of your upbringing without carrying the smallness that the upbringing also, inevitably, carried. Every origin carries both gifts and distortions. The work is to distinguish which is which, not to throw out all of it because some of it was small.
In my clinic in Urbana, I have met patients who made the opposite error. They held the rope so tightly they strangled their own lives with it. One man, a professional in his late forties, had spent twenty years refusing every opportunity that would require him to move past the three-block radius of his family’s expectation. He called this loyalty. His family called it devotion. It was also, quietly, a kind of paralysis. He was not honoring his origin. He was hiding inside it. The origin had become a place he could not leave, not because it held something irreplaceable, but because leaving it required him to face what he might become without its shape to fill.
The root feeds the tree. The rope ties the tree to a stake and calls it stability.
You will know which one you are holding by how it feels when you consider letting go. If you feel grief, loss, a tender severing, it is probably a root and you should slow down and listen to what it is carrying. If you feel relief, the light returning, the sense that something that has been pressing on your chest has lifted, it is probably a rope. You may untie it.
Roots are not portable in their original form. A seed is portable. A root that has found water cannot be carried in the same way. But roots are also not only literal. The things your origin gave you, the specific cadence of your thinking, the way you weigh obligation, the knowledge of which silence means respect and which means danger, the texture of your humor, the food that brings your dead grandmother into the room again, these are portable. These go with you. These are not ropes. They are the deepest and most reliable water, available in every country you carry yourself into.
I am a Kisii man who practices cardiology in Illinois. These two facts are not in competition. The boy who grew up in Sengera village is not a liability to the doctor on the cardiology floor. The cardiology floor would understand less about human hearts if the boy from Sengera had been successfully erased.
Roots feed. Ropes constrain. They are not the same anatomy.
I want to add one thing, because this chapter risks sounding like permission to be nostalgic when it is actually something harder. Honoring your roots requires knowing them accurately. Not the romantic version, not the compressed three-sentence version you give strangers, but the full version, which includes the beauty and the smallness and the things that were wrong before you arrived and that would have been wrong whether you had left or stayed. My village gave me astonishing gifts. It also gave me some things I had to put down, specific beliefs about which people matter, specific permissions that were given by gender and not by character, specific silences that were maintained for the benefit of order rather than truth. Honoring the origin does not mean swallowing all of it whole. It means knowing the difference between the nourishment and the part that, if you kept eating it, would do harm.
The work, in practical terms, is this: you return to your origin as a curious adult rather than as the child who last inhabited it. You ask questions you were not allowed to ask then. You locate the specific gifts, name them, claim them. You locate the specific distortions, name them, decline them. This is not disloyalty. This is love with eyes open. A root that is examined is stronger than one that is merely assumed.
A Mirror
Think of one element of your origin that you have been carrying in silence, not because it is shameful but because the new context did not seem to have a place for it. What is the name of that thing? (Listening for: the suppressed origin detail that still carries warmth or meaning, the thing put down out of efficiency rather than necessity.)
Where in your current life do you experience friction between where you came from and where you are? Is that friction productive, or has it become a habit of self-erasure? (Listening for: the distinction between adaptive tension and compulsive translation, the code-switching that has become involuntary.)
If you were to describe your origin to someone who had never heard of it, speaking with the same authority with which you describe your professional accomplishments, what would you say? (Listening for: access to pride versus apology, the register in which the reader holds their own beginning.)
Name one thing your origin gave you that actually helps you do what you do now, even if it cannot be put on a résumé. (Listening for: the reconnection of origin to competence, the capacity the reader has been using without crediting its source.)
Is there anyone in your life from whom you have been hiding your roots? What would happen if you stopped? (Listening for: concealment patterns, the relationship contexts that have required the most self-erasure.)
Letter from Dr. Job
Subject: The roots you have been hiding
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from traveling light when you should be traveling whole. I know it. I spent years being the short-version of myself in rooms that deserved the full one.
Your origin is not a burden you have been graciously managing. It is a water source. The specific things it gave you, the way you read a room, the way you carry obligation, the stubbornness that your supervisors misread and your closest people depend on, these did not arrive from your credential. They arrived from before your credential.
I am not asking you to wear your roots as a badge. I am asking something simpler: stop apologizing for them. Stop compressing them to fit a conversation that was never designed to hold them. The people worth being in a room with will not require the compression.
This week, name one thing from where you come from and carry it forward, deliberately, undefended. Just once. See what moves.
— Job