I gained fluency and lost intimacy. You learned every language but forgot your own.
The Ekegusii word is eyana. Breath. I say it now and something in my chest opens slightly. Not because it is a beautiful word, though it is. But because it is the word that carries the specific weight of my grandmother’s kitchen and the smoke-smell of the cooking fire and the sound of women talking behind a thin partition while I pretended to sleep as a boy in Sengera. Eyana does not translate to “breath” in the way a dictionary translates. It translates in the body. The word carries its house with it.
I have been speaking English for thirty years. My English is now better than it has any right to be, given that I learned it in a place where the textbooks were years out of date and the teachers were doing their best with what the government allocated. I can deliver a keynote. I can testify in a deposition. I can charm a conference room, write a paper, diagnose in the precise clinical idiom of an American medical education. I am fluent. I know how to be fluent.
What I had not understood, for too long, was that fluency in the outer language had cost me something in the inner one.
When you learn a second language well enough, something happens to the first one. This is documented in the linguistics literature, though the mechanism is still debated. What is less debated is the psychological cost. Claudia Allen McCluney and her colleagues, in a 2019 piece in the Harvard Business Review drawing on workplace research, described what code-switching costs people who must perform a different cultural version of themselves in professional settings: it generates cognitive load, erodes authenticity, and for some, produces what they called a wearing-down effect, the slow attrition of the version of yourself that existed before the translation (McCluney et al. 2019, Harvard Business Review, hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-code-switching). The evidence is rated Promising on the Honesty Scale: the findings are consistent across multiple studies but rely heavily on self-report and have not been tested in longitudinal designs with clinical endpoints.
But I did not need a study to tell me what I had already felt. The wearing-down had a texture I knew.
It began in Eldoret. At Moi University, I had a name the university did not pronounce correctly, and I had learned, by small corrections and the micro-expressions of those correcting, that the correct pronunciation was one that sounded less like the village. I did not fight this. The correcting did not feel hostile. It felt like education. And in a technical sense it was. The problem was that the language I was being educated into was not a neutral vehicle. Every language carries the values and assumptions of the people who made it the prestige form. When I learned to think in English, I did not only learn new words. I learned the specific way English arranges the world, what it elevates, what it diminishes, what it makes easy to say and what it makes difficult.
Ekegusii has no precise equivalent for many things English considers elementary. But English has no precise equivalent for things Ekegusii handles naturally. Engako. The calm pocket behind the rock. You can translate the individual words. You cannot translate what the image carries. The closest English can get is “eddy,” which is a hydraulics term and carries no philosophy. Engako carries a philosophy: that the river is not your enemy, the rock is not an obstacle, and stillness is not the absence of the river but the gift the river makes when it meets resistance.
I had stopped thinking in Ekegusii somewhere around the mid-2000s. Not deliberately. The way you stop doing anything you stop needing for daily function. And when I stopped thinking in it, I lost access to a particular quality of interior attention. A softer vocabulary for the inner life. English is precise for the outer world. It names things beautifully when the things can be seen. My interior life, the grief and the gratitude and the specific longing that has no external referent, lived more naturally in the older language. English gave me the boardroom. Ekegusii had given me access to the room where I lived alone.
This is not a Kenyan problem. It is a human problem with a particular intensity in people who have crossed cultural contexts. The professional who grew up speaking one language at home and another in the office. The first-generation graduate who translates their family to their colleagues every day and cannot remember when they stopped having to translate. The immigrant who has been in the adopted country long enough that the mother tongue now feels foreign, and the adopted tongue still feels slightly borrowed. The middle child who learned early to read the room before speaking and now speaks only in the register the room requires, unable to locate the register that existed before the room.
What you lose in the translation is not the language. It is the vocabulary for your softest thoughts. The thoughts that exist before editing. The ones that arrive in the early morning before the performing self has put on its face. Those thoughts, in my experience, do not come to me in English first. They arrive in something older, something that has no accent and does not care about the conference room.
The return to intimacy does not require you to give up the fluency. The bilingual person is not diminished by knowing two languages. The cost is in the forgetting, not in the learning. The cost is in the moment when you realize you have been so busy being understood by the outer world that you have stopped being understood by yourself.
I have begun, in the last few years, to carry eyana consciously. Not as a cultural performance, not as the kind of thing you put in a keynote to signal authenticity. Just as a word that means something the English word does not. I say it quietly sometimes before I begin a difficult conversation, the way some people say a prayer. Not because it is magic. Because it is mine. Because the word carries the kitchen in it and the grandmother and the particular quality of attention the village had for the living breath of things.
The language you forgot is the one you used to think your softest thoughts in.
This does not mean you must speak it daily. It means you must stop pretending you do not miss it. The missing is information. It is telling you that part of you has been exiled into silence for reasons that were practical once and are not necessary now. You may, carefully, quietly, bring that part back.
Not all the way. That is not the point. The point is that you do not translate yourself out of existence. The code-switch has its place. It is a tool. The problem begins when the tool becomes the only tool, when you begin to believe that the translation is the authentic version and the original was merely a draft.
You are not a draft. You are the text in its first and truest form. The translations have served you. They do not replace you.
There is one more register I want to name, because it is the one most likely to be unnoticed. It is not a language. It is a way of being quiet. Every culture has a specific texture to its silences: the silence of respect, the silence of grief, the silence of waiting, the silence of thinking, the silence of a person who does not yet know what to say but has not yet given up. The Kisii silence I grew up in was a particular kind: observant, patient, present without requiring resolution. The professional silence I was trained into is different: efficient, transitional, a holding pattern between statements. I have been code-switching between these two silences for years without noticing that they are different. The professional silence says: I am processing and will respond shortly. The Kisii silence says: I am here with you, fully, and the response will arrive when it arrives. These are different gifts to offer in a room, and I have been offering the cheaper one.
The intimacy you have been trying to maintain, in your closest relationships, in your most honest moments, requires the older silence more than the newer one. The people who love you best know this already. They are the ones who stay in the room with you past the last efficient thing you said.
The Ekegusii verb for what this chapter is pointing toward is irana: to return. Not to go backward, not to rebuild the past, but to re-enter something that was native. Return, as a word, carries direction: it implies you have been somewhere else and are coming back. The chapter is the beginning of the return to an interior that the professional years covered over. Irana does not require speed. It does not require a complete homecoming today. It requires only that the direction changes.
A Mirror
Is there a language, dialect, or register, even a way of speaking that was native to you as a child, that you no longer use? When did you put it down? (Listening for: the suppressed interior vocabulary, the specific moment or gradual erosion of a native register.)
In which language or which register do you think your most unguarded thoughts? Is it the same one you speak publicly? (Listening for: the gap between public fluency and interior intimacy, the private language that has been discontinued.)
Who, in your current life, are you speaking to when you are closest to your original self? What does that conversation sound like? (Listening for: the relationships where the translation cost is lowest, the remaining access points to the unperformed self.)
Has the code-switching become a reflex rather than a choice? Can you tell, in the moment, when you are translating and when you are speaking from the original? (Listening for: the degree of automaticity in self-translation, whether the reader has access to the choice point.)
What would you say, in your softest language, to the version of you that is reading this sentence right now? (Listening for: direct interior voice, the capacity to speak to oneself with tenderness in a register that does not perform.)
Letter from Dr. Job
Subject: Your softest tongue
I went years without speaking Ekegusii in any meaningful way. Not because I was ashamed of it. Because the days kept arriving in English, and the English was fast and useful and got things done.
What I lost in that stretch was harder to name than a word. It was a quality of inner attention that the older language made possible. A particular softness. The vocabulary for the things that happen before you decide what to feel.
You have a language like that. It may not be Ekegusii. It may be the idiom of your neighborhood, or the register your mother used when you were sick, or the particular humor that your closest childhood friend understood without explanation. Whatever it is, you have been translating it out of your days for a long time.
I am not telling you to stop code-switching. I am telling you to remember that the code-switch is a tool, not an identity. The original is still there.
One sentence this week, in the register that feels most like home, even if you say it only to yourself.
— Job