Miriam Mutebi, Consultant Breast Surgeon at Aga Khan University Hospital, Nairobi, and Assistant Professor of Surgery at Aga Khan University, shared on LinkedIn:

“I was tires for year before i understood why.

The long shifts and night calls were manageable. What drained me was something else entirely: performing a version of myself I thought was required to survive medicine.

Looking back, there were two masks I wore for longer than I needed to.

The FIRST was the Mask of Seriousness.

Medical school teaches you early that competent doctors look composed at all times. So I practiced stillness. Talked in a measured, moderate voice, and laughed a little less.

When a patient died, I felt grief like a physical weight in my chest, but my face remained neutral. I told myself this was discipline.

The first crack came after a long night shift. We had lost a young mother. Her sister sat in the corridor holding a plastic bag with the woman’s clothes, staring at nothing. Something in me couldn’t maintain the performance. I sat beside her. My own eyes welled up.

A senior colleague gently warned me not to become ‘too involved’.

I understood the concern. But what happened in that corridor wasn’t a lapse in professionalism.

It was simply an acknowledgment of shared humanity.

The SECOND was the Mask of Cultural Neutrality.

During training, I gravitated toward muted colors, minimal jewellery, anything that felt neutral. Then one day I wore a set of beautiful brass rings my mother had given me. A patient noticed them, looked up at me and smiled.

‘Doctor, you look like home.’

Nothing about my surgical skill had changed. But the atmosphere in the room did.

That day, I learnt that when you stop performing, patients relax more quickly. Conversations opened more easily, and you recover energy that was never meant to focus on concealment.

Tell me.