My friend called me Incognito Rastaman. He said it laughing. The kind of laugh that is also a little bit of an accusation. We had been on a Snapchat streak, the two of us, the way old friends do when they are not close enough anymore to call but not distant enough to lose completely.
ut we were close once. Closer than that word usually means.
We shared a room. The same four walls, the same ceiling, the same nights that stretched long because we were young and had nowhere urgent to be. He was finding his voice as a DJ. Reggae shows, events, and radio. I used to play guitar for him. Ragga rhythms, slow and heavy, while he practiced over them. I knew every Damian Marley, Vybz Kartel, Pressure Buss Pipe lyric: every riddim worth knowing. Music was not something we consumed in that room. It was something we made. Something we lived inside.
Then I went into the corporate world. And somewhere along the way, I packed the rastaman into a bag and left him at the door.
He noticed.
Here is what nobody tells you about ambition. It does not just ask for your time. It asks for your taste. Your references. The things you talk about when the conversation gets comfortable. It asks you to read the room so well that eventually you stop being someone who reads the room and become someone afraid to be read.
Corporate culture has a sound. A dress code for personality. Some things signal seriousness, and things that signal that you are not quite serious enough. And reggae, somewhere in the unwritten rules of the rooms I was trying to enter, did not make the list.
So I made a quiet decision. Not a dramatic one. I did not sit down and choose to hide anything. It happened the way most small surrenders happen. Gradually. Reasonably. One adjusted reference at a time. One unplayed playlist at a time. One moment of deciding that this particular part of me was better kept offstage.
I told myself it was just professionalism. Context-switching. Knowing your audience.
It was also a little bit of shame dressed up in sensible language.
I have met many versions of this person.
- The woman who grew up speaking her mother tongue at home but trained herself out of the accent because she decided it made people take her less seriously.
- The man who loves Afrobeats but curates a different persona for LinkedIn.
- The person who code-switches so fluently that they sometimes forget which code is the original.
We do it because it works. That is the truth that the inspirational version of this story skips over. Fitting in has real returns. The adjusted accent gets the callback. The curated persona gets the engagement. The incognito version of you moves through certain spaces with less friction.
But friction is not always the enemy. Sometimes, friction is just the feeling of being fully present. Of taking up the space your whole self requires instead of the smaller, tidier space your edited self fits into.
The cost of the edit is subtle. It is not that you fail. It is that you succeed as someone slightly less than who you are. And over time, that gap between the self that shows up and the self that stays home becomes its own kind of exhaustion.
There is a version of professionalism that is genuinely about the work. Showing up prepared. Communicating clearly. Being someone people can rely on. That kind of professionalism has nothing to do with your taste in music or where you came from or what you sounded like before the world started measuring you.
And then there is a version of professionalism that is really just conformity with better branding. That version asks you to shrink. To sand off the edges. To become a more palatable, more legible, more inoffensive version of the person you actually are.
That second version does not make you more professional. It just makes you easier to overlook.
The most interesting people I have met in boardrooms are the ones who brought something in with them. A perspective that did not come from the same three business schools and the same five frameworks that everyone else was citing. A way of seeing that was shaped by something outside the usual coordinates of corporate life.
Those people do not succeed despite the thing that makes them different. They succeed because of it. The difference is not the obstacle. The difference is the advantage. It just takes longer to see that when you are standing at the door deciding what to leave outside.
My friend (Jahtaman) called me Incognito Rastaman, and I laughed.
Because he was not just describing a music preference I had quietly archived. He was describing the version of me that used to sit in our shared room at night, guitar in hand, playing ragga rhythms while he practiced his sets. The version of me that knew every lyric, felt every bassline, and never once thought that any of it was something to be managed or hidden or apologised for.
That person did not disappear when I put on the suit. He just stopped being invited.
I do not think the answer is to walk into every boardroom playing Damian Marley. Context still matters. Reading a room is still a skill worth having.
The suit is real. The guitar is also real. The lyrics, the room, the friend, the music we made before either of us knew what we were becoming. All of it is real. All of it is mine.
You have been code-switching so long that you forgot it was a choice. It still is.
