The Voice That Gave Me Permission

Six years after losing the man who taught me how to turn scars into stories

It's been several years now since Chef Anthony Bourdain passed. This isn't a martial arts piece. It's not one of my usual reflections on training or discipline. It's something more personal—about the man who made me a writer. I've been writing for years because of his voice. Only recently have I found the courage to share those stories. If you've been following my work, you've heard his voice between the lines.

There's a particular kind of grief that comes from losing someone you never met. Someone whose voice lived in your headphones during long drives, whose words sat dog-eared on your nightstand, whose way of seeing the world quietly rewired your own.

Six years ago today, Anthony Bourdain died.

And something in me broke that I didn't know could break.

Not because I knew him... I didn't. But because he'd given me something I hadn't known I was looking for: permission to tell the truth about the messy, beautiful, complicated business of being human.

The Sound Of Recognition

I first encountered Tony through A Cook's Tour, back when the world was smaller and television still felt like discovery. Here was this guy wandering through markets in Vietnam, sitting in tiny kitchens with grandmothers who spoke no English, finding the sacred in the ordinary act of sharing food.

But it wasn’t the travel that hooked me. It was the voice.

Raw. Unpolished. Willing to admit when he was wrong, when he was scared, when he was completely out of his depth. He talked about food the way I thought about martial arts; as something that could save you, break you, teach you who you really were.

When No Reservations started, I was religiously watching every episode. Not just for the places he went, but for how he saw them. How he could find poetry in a roadside diner, dignity in the humblest meal, meaning in the space between what we say and what we mean.

But there was something else. Something that made my chest tight with recognition.

I'd been to some of those places. Not the exact spots, but the spiritual cousins.

The food stalls in Bangkok where you point at what looks good and hope for the best. The tiny family restaurants tucked into Roman side streets where the menu exists only in the owner's head. The ramen stands in Tokyo where the master has been perfecting the same broth for decades.

Over forty countries so far, and I’d always been drawn to the same corners Tony found. The places where tourists don't venture. Where you communicate through gestures and smiles and the universal language of hunger.

Most of those journeys I made alone. By choice, by circumstance, by the particular restlessness that comes from never quite fitting anywhere. Solo travel strips away pretense. Forces you to be present. Makes you dependent on the kindness of strangers in ways that can surprise you.

I'd felt that magic he captured, the way sharing a meal with strangers can dissolve every barrier between you. How a grandmother in Taiwan can make you feel at home with nothing but a bowl of beef noodle soup and genuine curiosity about where you come from. How breaking bread together, even when you don't share a language, creates a moment of pure human connection.

The solitude makes it more intense somehow. When you're traveling alone, those encounters become lifelines. The vendor who remembers how you like your coffee. The family who invites you to join their table even though you're clearly a foreigner who stumbled into their neighborhood joint. The moments when food becomes a bridge between your isolation and their warmth.

Watching Tony do the same thing - sitting in those cramped kitchens, laughing with people whose names he'd never quite pronounce correctly, finding the sacred in steam rising from a pot... felt like watching someone else live parts of my own life. He was giving voice to experiences I'd had but never knew how to describe. That particular loneliness of the perpetual outsider, and how food could temporarily cure it.

Then I read Kitchen Confidential.

And everything clicked.

The Restaurant Kid Recognition

Reading that book was like looking in a funhouse mirror... distorted but unmistakably familiar.

Tony's kitchen stories brought me straight back to my father's restaurants as a kid in Japan and Norway. The controlled chaos. The profanity. The strange camaraderie of people working impossible hours for mediocre pay because they loved something about the work itself.

I was probably nine, maybe ten, spending weekends and school holidays learning the bottom rung of kitchen work; dishes, pots and pans so large I could literally stand inside them while scrubbing. Watching line cooks move like dancers in a space the size of a closet. Getting yelled at in Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish when I got in the way. Learning that "behind you, hot" was both warning and prayer.

Tony wrote about the underbelly of restaurant culture. The drugs, alcohol, the violence, the way kitchens could chew people up and spit them out. My experience had its own darkness. Chefs drinking on the job, coming in so hungover they could barely function. The constant drama between wait staff and kitchen, feuds that could explode over the smallest slight. Learning the best hangover cures from the head-chef when I was eleven, twelve... proper Gen X child labor.

But I recognized the rhythm Tony described. The way food service attracts people who don't fit anywhere else, or those with bigger dreams just passing through until something better comes along. The strange honor code that develops when you're all suffering together.

But more than the shared experience, it was how he wrote about it that stopped me cold.

He didn't romanticize it. Didn't pretend it was noble or pure. He just told the truth, with all its contradictions intact.

The Permission Slip

I'd been writing since I was a kid. Cowboy stories set in Colorado mountains, always featuring some heroic character named Steve (go figure). Later, martial arts essays that tried to sound wise and traditional, following the formula I'd absorbed from books by Dave Lowry and other martial writers.

Respectful. Proper. Careful not to reveal too much.

But after reading Tony, something shifted.

I thought: This is how I want to sound when I write.

Not like a teacher delivering wisdom from on high, but like a fellow traveler sharing what the road had shown him. Someone willing to admit that he was still figuring it out, still making mistakes, still carrying wounds from childhood that shaped how he moved through the world.

He gave me permission to write about martial arts the way he wrote about food - as something that could be simultaneously sacred and profane, beautiful and brutal, transformative and traumatic.

But more than that, he showed me it was possible to mine your most difficult experiences for meaning without drowning in them. To acknowledge the weight of displacement, abandonment, violence... all the things that shape you when you're too young to choose, and transform them into something useful. Something that might help someone else feel less alone.

Finding My Own Voice

The first piece I wrote after reading Kitchen Confidential was different.

Rawer.

It was about moments from my childhood I'd never named directly. The weight of being responsible for my sister when I was barely old enough to take care of myself, the strange education that came from growing up in adult spaces, the way displacement becomes a kind of armor.

Not because it was dramatic, but because it was true. Because it shaped how I thought about power, about control, about what it means to protect yourself in a world that doesn't always have your back.

I wrote about being homeless at nineteen and still showing up to train because the dojo was the only place that felt like home. About eating 19-cent packets of ramen dry, uncooked, spreading it out over days because I couldn't afford to buy another... but couldn't afford to miss class either.

About the way martial arts saved me, not because it made me tough, but because it gave me a place to put all the anger and fear and loneliness I'd been carrying around.

Tony had shown me that you could take your worst experiences and alchemize them into something useful. Something that might help someone else feel less alone in their own darkness.

The Therapeutic Archaeology

Writing became a way of excavating my own life. Digging through layers of experience I'd buried or forgotten, finding the stories that had shaped me without my realizing it.

The racism in Japan that taught me to disappear. The abandonment in Europe that taught me to survive. The years of moving from place to place that made me a perpetual outsider, always observing, never quite belonging.

I started writing about what it means to be culturally homeless. To carry multiple languages in your head but never feel fluent in any of them. To love traditions you're not sure you have a right to claim.

Tony understood displacement. He wrote about it constantly. The way travel changes you, the difficulty of coming home to a place that no longer fits, the strange comfort of being a stranger everywhere you go.

The Melancholy Permission

But maybe what I learned most from Tony was how to hold sadness and humor in the same breath. How to find beauty in broken things. How to write about pain without wallowing in it, without making it the whole story.

He showed me that melancholy wasn't something to cure or overcome - it was a lens that could make ordinary moments luminous. That the best stories often came from the spaces between joy and sorrow, where real life actually happens.

I started writing about the quiet moments in training. About what keeps you showing up when everything else is uncertain. About how training becomes less about improvement and more about proof. Proof that you still exist, that you can still choose something, that tomorrow might be different if you just keep moving.

About getting older in an art designed for the young. About teaching students who might never understand what the practice gave you. About continuing to show up even when you're not sure why anymore.

The Unfinished Conversation

Six years later, I'm still writing. Still trying to excavate truth from experience. Still using the voice Tony helped me find.

But I miss him. Miss the new episodes that won’t come. Miss the books he won’t write. Miss the way he kept pushing boundaries, asking difficult questions, refusing to let anyone - including himself - off the hook.

Mostly, I miss knowing he was out there somewhere, still turning his life inside out for the rest of us to examine. Still proving it was possible to be simultaneously cynical and hopeful, wounded and wise, broken and beautiful.

The Inheritance

The text from my wife six years ago - “Anthony Bourdain died today” - hit me like a physical blow. Because it felt like losing family. Like losing the person who’d taught me it was okay to be complicated.

But in the years since, I’ve come to understand his death differently. Not as an ending, but as a challenge.

He showed us what was possible. How to take the raw material of a messy life and shape it into something meaningful. How to write with enough honesty to cut through the noise. How to find connection in the most unlikely places.

Now it’s our turn.

To keep telling the difficult stories.
To refuse easy answers.
To write like our lives depend on it - because sometimes they do.

Tony’s gone. But the permission he gave us remains.

The permission to be honest about our hunger, our displacement, our beautiful disasters.
The permission to find meaning in the broken places.
The permission to keep showing up, even when, especially when, we don’t know what we’re doing.

Tony’s words come back to me:
I feel like I’ve stolen a car - a really nice car. And I’m still driving it, grateful for every mile.