Code-Switching Was Always Meant to Bring You Back Home

When Performance Becomes Identity

Many people never realize when performance stops being a temporary strategy and becomes a permanent identity. The performance begins as something purposeful, a way to stabilize, protect, provide, or survive. And, slowly, becomes the only way a person knows how to exist.

In my culture, we have a term called code-switching. It means we have cues that lead us to behave based on a foreign environment and cues to reorient ourselves when we return home. Success, however, can sometimes make people lose their way back home, or forget to return home.

The Courage to Find Your Way Back

Keke Palmer spoke as a living example of that forgetting, and the courage it takes to find your way back, in her recent TED Talk. Several things about her declared transformation moved me deeply. 

She is young, far younger than when I made the discovery of returning home to myself in my mid-forties. Albeit, she has been working since age ten and was a millionaire by twelve. It means her performance began early, took root early, and the realization required courage at an age when most people are still building the life that will eventually exhaust them.

The prolific actress and entertainer also lent her voice to the vulnerability of trading performance for success in a way that few professionals are willing to name it that clearly or that publicly. That kind of honesty requires its own form of courage.

And perhaps most powerfully, she spoke about the pressure of family sacrifice with full ownership. She felt the weight and she chose to carry it, in partnership with her family rather than as a victim of their needs. That distinction is everything.

A Similar Kind of Weight

I understood Keke Palmer immediately, from a similar kind of weight. As the youngest in my family, I became the most educated and financially stable member. Achievement never felt personal. 

From the time I went to Cornell University at age 17, the commandment to perform was stated, for my family and for my people. My ability to succeed became symbolic, even without any monetary gain. My parents even felt entitled to approve who I could date and marry. 

My healing journey was delayed for decades while I was performing. While I had the great spouse, intelligent children, accolades and degrees, I also carried unaddressed childhood trauma that I held secret to avoid shame. Not personal shame. Family shame.

X-Ordinary People

Many of the people I work with experience the same detachment. Teachers, executives, caregivers, consultants, leaders, parents, professionals become so identified with their role, their responsibility, their usefulness, or their achievement that they lose connection with simply being human.

Like Keke Palmer and I, many people who forget to return home come from struggle and instability. They understood early the pressure of becoming the one who carries possibility for others. The performance served a real purpose. It protected. It created opportunity. There was something honorable in it, and in many cases, necessary.

The Labor No One Sees

But there is a sadness in forgetting how to return to yourself once survival stops driving the performance. Your performance starts to require invisible labor. Maintaining stability while privately absorbing pressure. Responding to others' needs instead of your own. Regulating the emotions in the room while suppressing your own.

Our culture makes the invisible labor harder to recognize. We praise the reliable one, the strong one, the accomplished one, the endlessly capable one. We applaud people for functioning at high levels even when they are emotionally disconnected from their own lives. Some people become so good at performing adulthood that the living gets lost inside it.

Returning Home

Beneath the celebrity, the applause, and the stage was something deeply recognizable in Keke Palmer that reminded me why she is one of my favorite actors. She is a human being who realizes that survival may have required the performance, but healing requires returning home to yourself. This is the space I love to meet people in.