keep your name. Not the one on the door. Not the one on the diploma. The name that came first.

Today I sat in a room that reminded me who I am. The man leading us, Professor Collins Airhihenbuwa, is known everywhere by his titles. Former department chair. Former dean of a school of public health. But when he introduced himself, he reached for none of it. He said: I am a father. A husband. A grandfather. A brother. An uncle. An elder. A friend. His humanity was all he preferred. Where there is blindness, there is always sight.

Behind him, a slide carried the face of Chinua Achebe and an old proverb: no man should enter his house through another man’s gate. He called it the genius of the “and.” Not professor or father. Professor and father. Not the storm or the star. Both. Your name is your own gate. Enter through it.

Then he asked the question that followed me home: Do you know who you are without what you do?

Academia trains us to answer with our titles. To say them with pride, eloquently, to anyone who cares. We worked hard for the credentials and the positions, so the least anyone can do is call us by them. I left that room resisting the pull of that world, refusing to let it dictate my humanity.

Because here is a woman, me, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a storyteller, named before any degree could describe who I would become. My bloodline saw it all before the degrees. Before the paths, bblissful, rocky, or thorny. Before the positions. Before the grants. They named me a woman for whom knowledge, the desire to learn anything, would be good. They did not call me doctor. They did not call me professor or teacher. They gave me a name that preceded all of it, a reminder that I am more than I could ever imagine, simply because they named me first.

I do not mean the name the world knows. That name is for the world. I mean my middle name, the one spoken by the few who know me to be more than myself. That name is a guiding principle. A watchtower. A spirit. My chi. Without that name I am nobody. Because of that name, I am more than this world could ever imagine.

Right after the presentation, a scholar approached and asked what makes me an implementation scientist. And I remembered my name. I am not an implementation scientist, I told him. I am a learner. A storyteller. A problem solver. I care so deeply about the problems I see in this world that I will pick up whatever tool might solve them. If the newest tool belongs to a field, I will stand front and center in that field. And if there is one thing in the field to know me by, know this: I want solutions with evidence with the field to last. The field calls it sustainment. I simply call it keeping.

This is the daily practice. The storm will hand you titles and take them away. The star is the name underneath, the one no career can give and no career can take. Every morning you get to choose which one you answer to. That choice, made daily, is the whole art of living.

Do you know who you are without what you do? After today, I do. And my name will always be visible, even among stars.

Keep this.