A note before you read this

This is Chapter Three of The Goldilocks Journey. If you missed it, Chapter One — and the note explaining what this series is — is here: https://medium.com/dabbler/i-learned-to-read-a-room-with-a-vacuum-in-my-hands-e9eeb2636e86.

Chapter Two is here: https://medium.com/dabbler/i-built-a-costume-with-a-pencil-still-in-my-hair-7a2782525c55.

Same two things apply: this is still a working draft, and some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the people in these pages. The people and events are real. Not every name is.

Follow along here on Medium for the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3: THE EXTENSION THAT SHOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED

Once a year for five years, I carried a folder of documents into a government office in Matsuyama and waited to be found out.

The rule was simple, and I didn’t meet it. A foreigner teaching English in Japan renewed his work visa every twelve months, and the renewal asked for proof of a college degree. I didn’t have one. I’d crossed a graduation stage in Illinois without earning the right to, flown over the ocean on a promise to finish two courses by correspondence, and let the courses go unfinished. So every year I sat in that office with the folder in my lap and watched the official work down the line ahead of me. I watched him ask the person in front of me for a diploma. I watched them hand it over. Then he’d take my papers, glance through them, and stamp the extension without once asking me for the thing I couldn’t produce.

Five years running. I don’t know to this day whether it was luck of the dull clerical kind, some box that never got checked, or whether somebody behind the scenes had decided to look past it for me. I never found out. I stopped expecting the question and never stopped bracing for it.

That’s the extension this chapter takes its name from, the visa renewed five times against the rules. Underneath it was a larger one I didn’t notice I was living inside. The plan had been one year. Teach somewhere that had never heard of THE Donn Durante, come home, sort out my life. I got to Matsuyama in August of 1991, a few weeks short of twenty-two, and I stayed six years. In the fifth of them, the year I’d never have reached if any one of those officials had gone by the book, I met the woman I’ve been married to now for going on twenty-eight years. Caro. She’d come to Japan from Argentina, a third-generation daughter of the Japanese who’d settled in Buenos Aires, through a program built to bring people like her back to the country their grandparents had left. We met in Matsuyama, half a world from either of our homes, in a year I was only there for by accident. If I’d been caught in year two, or three, or four, sent home with my folder and my good intentions, my whole family would be other people. My children wouldn’t exist. I think about that more than is probably good for me. The only life I care about, balanced on a clerk’s decision not to ask a question.

The Persona Crossed the Ocean

Matsuyama was no village. It’s the biggest city on the island of Shikoku, half a million people, the capital of Ehime Prefecture, mid-sized and busy and entirely indifferent to whether I was special. That didn’t stop me from trying to be. I’d like to tell you I arrived in Japan humbled, a young man who’d just gotten away with something and had the sense to be quiet about it. I didn’t. I arrived performing, the same as I’d left, the persona folded into the suitcase with the clothes.

Early on I got invited to lead a public English conversation class on Saturdays at a place everyone called EPIC, the Ehime Prefecture International Center. They handed me a room and free rein, and a smarter man would have taught English with it. What I built instead was a forum for my own ideas, conducted in English, which let me file it as a language class with a more or less straight face. I called it Spheres and Cones. I’d kept up the reading habit I’d stumbled into the summer I finished the Peale book, and I’d welded Maslow’s hierarchy of needs onto Stephen Covey’s circle of influence into something I was sure was profound. Turn the pyramid into a cone, the flat circle into a sphere, imply a couple of extra dimensions, and call it a way of seeing the world. I worked up my topics over Saturday-morning breakfasts with an expat friend named Jake, a Canadian who taught at one of the high schools, the two of us trading ideas over egg sandwiches and coffee while I rehearsed. After a while Jake started co-presenting. In honest hindsight the class was less a discussion than me thinking out loud in front of people and reading their faces for what came back.

And the faces kept coming. A handful the first few Saturdays, then more, then a hall I remember holding something near fifty. The staff told me the class had gotten popular, which was their gracious way of explaining how a small conversation group turned into a large audience. I told myself they kept showing up because an outsider’s questions rattled the assumptions they’d grown up inside, and maybe that was even partly true. But I know what the growing crowd did for me, because it was the very thing the fashion-show flowers and the engraved plaque had done back in Illinois. It fed the part of me that needed a crowd’s eyes to feel like anybody at all. Donn-sensei. Proof I was somebody.

And it wasn’t the only one I collected. I talked my way into a role as the Prefectural Representative for the Association for Japan Exchange and Teaching (AJET), the same reflex that had me chasing fashion-show jobs back in Illinois, because a title was one more place to stand where people had to look at me. The ideas outgrew the Saturday hall, too. I turned Spheres and Cones into my first website, on the free GeoCities pages everyone was building back then, and gave it the same name, so the audience could find me even after they’d gone home. Standing up every week to talk through ideas I actually cared about and gauge what came back was the first real rehearsal for work I’d circle back to decades later, at a keyboard instead of a lectern. I couldn’t have told you that then. Then, it was just a full hall and the sound of my own name.

Jake and I talked, more than once over those breakfasts, about writing a book together. We started one. We never finished it. I tried it alone too, once, and I remember that attempt in embarrassing detail. I’d seen enough of the right movies about what a writer’s life was supposed to look like, and I decided to live it for a weekend. I booked a night or two at the ANA Hotel in Matsuyama, far enough from my own apartment to count as going away, so I could seclude myself the way real authors did and bang out something worth keeping. I felt the part all the way through the lobby and up to the room. Then I sat down, and the feeling that had gotten me that far was gone before I’d finished unpacking. I left the hotel and gave the rest of the weekend to the city instead, downtown alone, a movie by myself among other things I don’t fully remember. Whatever I did with the time, almost none of it was writing. I came home with a half-hearted paragraph and a hotel bill I felt guilty about for weeks. I’d wanted to be a writer years before I was willing to do the part of it that happens alone at a desk with no one watching. That gap would take a long time to close.

Here’s a turn I didn’t engineer and only understood much later. The first three of my six years I taught through the JET Program, an assistant language teacher rotating through junior highs and elementary schools, Wednesdays at the prefectural board of education. JET capped you at three years back then, so as my third drew down I was packing up my life to go home. Then one of my adult students from the Saturday class, a police officer who’d been coming to practice his English, mentioned me to a friend of his who happened to run a private academy called Terakoya Group. The friend offered me a job, and I stayed another three years and rose to head teacher. So the very class I’d built to feed my ego turned out to be the thing that held the door open a second time, the door that should have closed at year three. I didn’t see the symmetry then.

Which brings me to the strangest part, the part I can only see from here. One of the books I carried into that EPIC class was Richard Bach’s Illusions, and the passage I kept circling back to was a parable about a village of creatures living at the bottom of a fast crystal river. They spend their whole lives clinging to the rocks and twigs of the riverbed, because clinging is the only safety they’ve ever known and the current is terrifying. One creature finally tires of it and lets go. The river batters him against the stones at first, bruises him badly, and still he refuses to grab hold again. Then the current lifts him, and he floats free. The creatures downstream see him pass overhead and call him a messiah, a savior, and beg him for his secret, and miss the whole point, which was only ever to let go themselves.

I taught that, with real feeling, to a hall that grew every week, while my own knuckles stayed white on a rock I couldn’t see. The picture of myself. The title. The eyes I needed on me. I was the creature lecturing on the current with both hands locked around a twig. I had no idea. You can teach a truth for years before you’re willing to live a day of it.

There was another tell I couldn’t read, and it was sitting on my own head. Because I’m of Asian descent, I could vanish on a Matsuyama sidewalk in a way the other foreigners couldn’t. In a crowd of fellow teachers on some prefectural outing I got the same treatment they did, a kind of minor celebrity granted for the crime of being visibly from elsewhere. Alone on a Sunday, running my own errands, I could pass for one more local man, unremarked, and I found I couldn’t stand it. So I grew my hair long and tied it back, because even if a stranger still read me as Japanese, a ponytail announced I wasn’t the standard issue. In a country with an old proverb about the nail that sticks up getting hammered down, where the deeper manners run toward folding into the group, I went hunting for a way to stick up on purpose. My students called the look kakkoii. Cool. I took it as proof I was being seen. I’d carried the same hunger across an ocean and was now performing it directly against the grain of a place that had organized itself around not needing it.

The Teacup Never Filled

And the place went to work on me anyway. Slowly, in a register I had no words for and wouldn’t have valued if I had.

The first time someone poured me green tea and stopped well short of the rim, I took it for carelessness, or thrift. It kept happening, cup after cup, in house after house, until I understood it was deliberate. A whole way of being that I’d much later hear named hara hachi bu. Eat until you’re about eight parts of ten full, and leave the rest. I felt the principle for years before I could say it, and it ran through far more than the tea. The people around me seemed under less compulsion than I was to push every good thing out to its last edge, to wring the final drop from a meal, an evening, a win. They left margins on purpose. The margin, it turned out, was the point.

I don’t want to dress this up as an enlightenment I didn’t earn. I was a young man borrowing the look of a culture while privately running my American engine wide open, and most of what the place offered me I left on the table. But six years is not a visit. You don’t take on a way of seeing by passing through it for a season and buying the souvenirs. You take it on by living inside it long enough that it edits you without your consent, until one ordinary day you notice you’ve stopped filling your own cup to the brim and can’t say when that started. I was a man built to fill every cup and be the nail that stood up, set down for six years in a place organized, patiently and without raising its voice, around the exact opposite. Most of it I pushed away. Some of it got in and stayed.

The silences worked on me the same way. I’d come from a world that treated a pause in conversation as a hole to be filled, fast, before it got awkward. Here the pause did work of its own. The half-second before someone answered, the space they left around a thing instead of rushing to paper over it, carried as much as the words on either side. I started reading those spaces the way I’d once read my mother’s face across a kitchen. For now I only knew the conversations felt different, and that some part of me was learning to wait inside them instead of filling them.

Waving at a Plane That Couldn’t See Us

People came and went constantly in that life. Teachers arrived on contracts and left when the contracts ended, and every leaving had its ritual. When someone went by taxi, we’d stand in the driveway and wave until the car rounded the corner, and then stay put a moment after it was gone. That’s the clearest picture I have of what those six years did to me, one I couldn’t read until thirty years after I’d packed up and gone. And once, seeing a friend off at the Matsuyama airport, we did the longer version. We said the goodbyes before he went through security, and then, instead of heading home, the whole group rode the elevator up to the rooftop observation deck. We stood at the rail and watched his plane push back from the gate and crawl toward the runway. No way to know whether he was at a window. No way he could have found our faces against that building even if he was. We waved anyway. We stayed at the rail and waved at a plane that couldn’t see us, watched it lift and shrink and slip into the clouds, and then we stayed a little longer still, after there was nothing left up there to wave at.

Impatience. We’d already said our goodbyes. He couldn’t possibly see us. The plane was gone, and the only thought left in my head was when we could leave. I stood at that rail, impatient, a man who believed the goodbye was the point of the thing and that we’d already passed it. Whatever came after it, I had no use for.

That impatience wore down over six years of standing at one rail or another. I can’t name the day it turned. But somewhere in there I quit checking my watch on those rooftops and began to understand that the staying-a-moment-longer wasn’t waiting for anything. It was the whole event. The goodbye was the easy part, the part anyone can do. What we were doing after the plane vanished, standing together in the empty air it left behind, was the part that mattered, and the impatient kid at the rail was the last one there equipped to know it.

It took me until 2025 to get the word for it. I was an ocean and most of a lifetime away from that rooftop when I heard a man on a podcast name the precise thing we’d been doing on those decks. I’m holding the word back until the end of this book, because it turns out to be the word the whole book has been walking toward. What I’ll say here is that the seed of it went into the ground on a rooftop in Matsuyama, planted in a young man too impatient to feel what his own feet were standing in.

I flew home to Chicago in the late summer of 1997, twenty-seven years old, six years past a plan that had called for one, and moved back into my parents’ house while I worked out what came next. The strangest part was how foreign home had become without my noticing it leave. Nobody bowed. The service in a store or a restaurant was quick and warm and a half-step short of the finish I’d grown used to without realizing it, friendly hands that never quite closed the loop. There was a sharpness in how people moved through one another on a sidewalk, each of us running our own errand at the dead center of our own world, a self-centeredness threaded through the whole place. I was part of it, no better than anyone around me. But I’d been gone long enough to see it now, and the seeing didn’t switch off. Six years had handed me a second pair of eyes I couldn’t take off at the gate.

And here’s the catch. The change was almost all in the eyes. The man behind them hadn’t caught up. I’d like to write that Japan had humbled me by then, that the visa I never earned and the cup that was never filled and the long waving at empty sky had finally settled the part of me that needed an audience. They hadn’t. Not yet. The lessons were in me the way a seed is in the ground, which is to say not visibly at all. What I actually carried down the jet bridge was a larger version of the same confidence I’d carried up it six years before, six years of Donn-sensei stacked on top. The pendulum had swung further out, when it should have started swinging back. The difference between reading a room to lift it and reading a room to rule it, between the gift that opens people up and the same gift turned to feed me, was still ahead of me, and it would cost me something to learn.

That’s the next chapter. This one ends on a rooftop in Matsuyama, a young man checking his watch, sure the goodbye was the only part that counted.

I Carried a Folder Into That Office Five Years Running was originally published in Dabbler on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A note before you read this

This is Chapter Two of The Goldilocks Journey. If you missed it, Chapter One — and the note explaining what this series is — is here: https://medium.com/dabbler/i-learned-to-read-a-room-with-a-vacuum-in-my-hands-e9eeb2636e86.

The same two things apply: this is still a working draft, and some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the people in these pages. The people and events are real. Not every name is.

Follow along here on Medium for the next chapter.

A kid sitting behind me at a school assembly reached up and worked a yellow #2 pencil into the gel of my hair. The first one fell out when I turned my head, and I let it drop and stared straight ahead like I hadn’t felt it. A few minutes later, he set a second one in deeper, and that one held. So I sat there in the dark of the auditorium with a pencil standing straight up out of my hair, the back of my head turned to whoever had done it, heat climbing my neck, doing the only math a bullied kid knows by heart: how to make it cost the least.

This was Marist, an all-boys Catholic high school on the south side of Chicago, predominantly white, walking distance from our house in Alsip. My parents picked it over the big public co-ed school where my friends were headed and where I’d have rather gone. I didn’t argue. They decided, and I complied, which was the stance I took on almost everything back then.

The dress code required a necktie every single day, and I didn’t mind the tie. I was good at the knot, which is a strange thing for a fourteen-year-old to take pride in when he’s good at almost nothing else. I tie them for strangers now, at the men’s clothing store where I work, a few times a day. Of everything Marist set out to teach me, a good knot is one thing that stuck.

What I was not good at was being left alone. For most of three years, a handful of bigger kids made a project of me. Shoulder punches in the hallway. Books knocked out of my arms and fanned across the floor while they laughed and stepped over them. One kid sat directly behind me in class and punched me in the back, again and again, where the teacher couldn’t see, hard enough to walk my desk forward an inch at a time. She’d turn at the sound of the chair legs scraping across the floor, and find nothing wrong.

I never reported any of it. Reporting it was just another way to be seen, and being seen was the whole problem.

When the second pencil held, I did something I still can’t fully explain. I turned around. Still scared. Scared as hell, honestly. But I turned and found the kid’s face. I can’t tell you it accomplished anything. He didn’t apologize. The pencil didn’t un-happen. But the turning cost me something, and I did it anyway, and that’s the first time I remember choosing the more expensive option on purpose. A small, useless, deliberate act of courage. I’ve come to think it’s the seed of everything I built next. And most of what I built next was a costume.

By the time that pencil went into my hair, I’d already been performing for years. I just hadn’t aimed it at anything yet.

When I was younger, my mother put us down for naps so she could sleep off her night shift. I’d outgrown napping and resented the lost hours, so I learned to fake it. I’d lie there and slow my breathing and keep my eyes shut and wait, listening, until I could hear that she’d fallen asleep herself, and then I’d slip out to watch cartoons. I thought I was running an elaborate operation. Years later, she told me she’d always more or less known, and that even if she’d caught me, she would have let it go. I keep relearning the same thing: a lot of my performing was for an audience that wasn’t watching nearly as closely as I imagined.

There was another morning I woke before everyone else, earlier even than my father, who in those years left the house before dawn whenever a project called for the extra hours, big projects that kept him out early and home late for weeks at a stretch. I heard him getting ready for work, and rather than let him find me up at that strange hour and maybe be annoyed, I climbed under the kitchen table and held still beneath the long tablecloth until I heard the front door close behind him. I wasn’t in danger. He wasn’t a frightening man. I was just a boy who’d decided, very early, that the safest way through a house was to manage how I was seen, or to arrange not to be seen at all.

So when I decided, around junior year, to stop being the kid with a pencil in his hair, the knack was already mine. I knew how to read a room and bend myself to fit it. I’d been doing it on my mother’s kitchen floor and under that tablecloth. What changed at Marist was the ambition. Now I had something I wanted to accomplish rather than something I wanted to avoid. I stopped using the skill to disappear and started using it to be seen.

Building the Costume

The kid I was trying to bury was specific. Short, skinny, and clumsy at any sport that involved catching a ball. I was the one who dropped the easy pass, though my friends never seemed to mind it as much as I did. I could run fast, at least, which is useful for exactly nothing when the problem is a crowded hallway between classes.

We didn’t have much money, and at a school where the better-off kids wore Polo, Izod, and Lacoste, I knew precisely what I had on and precisely what I didn’t. I’d grown up feeling deprived, keeping a running tally of what everyone else owned. So the clothes mattered to me more than clothes should matter to anyone.

Two things made the remake possible the year I turned sixteen: a driver’s license and a job at McDonald’s. The license was mobility. The job was money that was finally mine, which meant clothes that were mine, chosen instead of handed down.

Then I went looking for the instructions. I studied GQ and Muscle & Fitness magazines the way I should have been studying for school, reading them like a how-to guide for a different kind of person. One of them ran the old Charles Atlas ad, the skinny guy who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach, disappears, and comes back built, with the girl and the revenge. I knew that guy. I was that guy… minus the second half.

In the corner of our family room sat my father’s old weight set, the cheap kind, hollow plastic shells filled with sand, untouched for years. With the latest copy of Muscle & Fitness spread open on the carpet, I went to work on myself. Curls and presses after school until my arms shook.

That same summer before college, I read a book cover to cover for the first time in my life, by choice instead of assignment. The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale. My Dad had brought home a copy, and I picked it up because the title sounded like a manual for exactly what I was trying to do to myself. I couldn’t quote a line of it today. What I remember is finishing it and liking that I’d finished it, learning that a book could be a tool and not just homework. That was the start of a reading habit I never lost, though it took me years to admit the reading was as much a part of me as the bench press.

The look I was reaching for, I’d seen on real people. The summer before junior year, I started going to Bikol USA picnics, the big gatherings of Filipino families who immigrated to Chicago from the Bikol region. There it was, demonstrated by older teenagers. Flat-top haircuts, high and sharp. Clothes that fit. Bodies that got noticed instead of bodies that ducked out of sight.

There was a girl named Lisa, whom everyone seemed to know, beautiful, always surrounded. I knew her only by reputation and admired her from a safe distance, and I noticed the guys nearest her all had the same look. I filed it away and went home and grew out a duck-tail of my own. The same gelled-up hair a kid could plant a pencil in was the hair I’d started treating as a signal, and if my head was going to draw a crowd, I’d at least decide what kind.

I changed the hair, bought better clothes with McDonald’s money, did the bicep curls in the family room, and the bullying carried on more or less unchanged. None of it worked right away, and that’s worth sitting with. The remake didn’t end the thing it was built to end. What it gave me instead was a project and a deadline. I’d be unrecognizable by the time I left for college, a whole new stage with nobody in the audience who’d known the old me, and a year to build the person who would walk out onto it.

THE Donn Durante

The first time I heard it, I was a junior in college, and someone said it in passing, with a little weight on the front of it. THE Donn Durante. It worked better than I had any right to expect. I took it for one person’s idea of a joke. Then I heard it again, from someone else, in a different room, and again after that, and at some point I stopped arguing with it. I didn’t invent the name. It would be a better story if I had. Other people started saying it. I just declined to correct them.

The University of Illinois is enormous, and my version of it was small, concentrated almost entirely inside the Filipino and Asian American student associations, nowhere close to campus-wide. But inside that world, the remake took hold. I modeled in the student fashion shows, then coordinated them. I worked up a few moves at a party and got recruited to help choreograph routines for the big auditorium. I spun records at a house party and ended up the resident DJ at a bar on Green Street. Each thing fed the next. The scared introvert was still in there, fully intact. I was still too nervous to walk up to a girl I liked. I’d just gotten good enough at being looked at that I could get her to come to me instead. That was the entire trick. Arrange to be approached.

There’s one tryout I still think about. Most of the shows I had been in lived inside the Asian associations, friendly ground, but one of them, the Textile Apparel Group show, was mostly white students, and you had to audition for a panel of judges. Out of my comfort zone, out of my league, and Lisa, the same girl from the picnics, was trying out too.

So I brought a trick. I’d been rehearsing a move on my walk: you catch a person’s eye, drop your gaze for a quick scan down and back up, then return to their eyes. Done right, it makes them feel a half-second of discomfort and then, strangely, flattered. I picked out the head judge, a tall, composed woman who in any other context would have made me sweat, and on my pass down the runway, I caught her eye, ran the scan, and finished it with a small wink. Her eyebrows went up. Then she smiled and wrote something down. I made the show.

I was proud of it at the time. I’d run the move clean and gotten exactly the reaction I was after. It’s only looking back that I see the trick for what it actually was: the same move I once ran on my mother’s kitchen floor, grown up now and aimed at a stranger I wanted something from. Read the person, find the lever, pull it. The clean floor had been a kindness with an angle hidden inside it. This one was the angle with the kindness scraped off. I wasn’t doing it to be kind. I was doing it because I wanted something, and I got it.

By senior year, the persona had titles to go with it. Head coordinator of the whole fashion show, an officer in the Filipino student association, and I didn’t chase those jobs to serve anybody. I chased them because they put me in front of people. I ran the rehearsals on one repeated promise, that we were going to put on the best damn fashion show this university had ever seen, and when the night was over, the cast handed me flowers and a plaque with those exact words engraved on it.

My parents and my sisters were out in the audience. My ego was lit all the way up. Around that same time, at the meeting to elect the next year’s officers, I floated the idea of staying an extra year just to run again, mostly to watch people react to the threat of losing me. They reacted. The reaction was the point.

The Room I Actually Read

A year before that plaque, junior year, the night before a different show, we held our final dress rehearsal, and it fell apart. The coordinator that year, a guy named Curtis, hadn’t won the room. People didn’t buy his vision and bristled at taking direction from him, and by late that night, the whole production was coming undone. Models blowing cues. Scene coordinators arguing in corners. Everyone was certain we were about to humiliate ourselves in front of a packed house in under twenty-four hours. The air in that practice space had a texture I could have named blindfolded by then. Frustration thickening toward a cliff.

I knew that texture from my mother’s kitchen. And without deciding to, I climbed up onto the stage and asked everyone for a minute. I didn’t have a speech. I just said the true things. That Curtis was doing his best with a hard job. That the mood that night was about to sink a show we’d all given months to. That we had a few hours left and a choice about how to spend them. I meant every word, which is the only reason it worked. You cannot fake the thing that turns a room back toward itself. When I jumped down, one of the models called out, half-joking, “Donn for President!” The next night, the show was better than any of us expected.

If the chapter ended at the plaque, you’d have all the evidence you needed. A kid who’d built a convincing surface over nothing. All performance, no substance. That’s the phrase I’ve used on myself for years, and it’s mostly fair. It’s also not the whole truth. I still can’t resolve it. That was indeed a performance. I was up on a stage, reading a room and moving it where I wanted it to go, and I loved being the one who did it. It was also completely real. The belief was real, the words were true, the result was good for everybody, and not just for me. Both of those things are the same minute of my life. The gift and the performance were never two separate instruments. They were always the same one, and the only question that ever mattered was which way I had it pointed.

Walking a Stage I Hadn’t Earned

The clearest evidence of which way I usually had it pointed is the way I left U of I.

I’d come to Illinois to be an engineer. Electrical engineering, because my father was a civil engineer, and I was good at math, and the whole equation made sense on paper. Secure. Respectable. My parents proud. I’d even shown up with a stack of AP credits, enough to finish in three and a half years if I’d felt like it. I took Japanese 101 my freshman year because I had a notion of becoming an engineer in Japan, where all the electronics I admired were coming from. One summer, I interned at my father’s firm and came away unable to picture myself doing that for the rest of my life.

The engineering did not survive contact with me. What belongs here is where I ended up afterwards. Out of engineering and into psychology, which I actually loved. But loving a subject and doing its work are different jobs, and I never closed the gap. I was busy being THE Donn Durante. The degree was the part I kept meaning to get around to.

By my final semester, I had JET lined up, a teaching job in Japan waiting in the fall, and that cushion let me coast straight off the edge. I failed two electives. One was an intro to poetry class I attended maybe four times. The instructor was kind about it. She pulled me aside before the final to tell me, matter-of-factly, that I’d fail no matter how I did on the exam, because I’d never turned in a required paper. The other was a mythology course in Foellinger Auditorium, the same hall where I’d choreographed routines to applause. I slept through the lectures up in the balcony. The ten-page paper I owed, I stretched to length with a giant font, double spacing, and margins you could drive a truck through. I gave that auditorium everything when it had an audience and nothing when it had a syllabus.

I wasn’t eligible to graduate. The two failing grades simply hadn’t caught up with the paperwork yet. And I walked anyway. May 1991, cap and gown, my parents out in the seats, cameras up. My mother had worked nights for exactly this kind of moment. My father had left before dawn for the same one, all those years of overtime on projects that never seemed to end. I crossed the stage and shook the hand and smiled, and I felt like precisely what I was. An imposter performing a graduation he hadn’t earned. I told my parents I’d finish the two courses by correspondence from Japan, and I meant it enough to sign up and start them, and not enough to finish. The diploma never came. It still hasn’t.

So I flew to Japan at twenty-one with a surface that finally fit, a gift for reading a room that I mostly aimed at myself, a name said with weight, and a promise I already half-knew I’d break. One year, the plan said. Teach English somewhere nobody had ever heard of THE Donn Durante, then come home and sort out my life.

I stayed six years. The country I’d once dreamed of entering as an engineer had a particular gift for telling a performance from the thing underneath it, and it went to work on me a year in, at a government counter, renewing my visa, with an official about to ask for the degree I didn’t have.

That’s the next chapter. This one ends with the boy still believing the surface would hold.

I Built a Costume With a Pencil Still in My Hair was originally published in Dabbler on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Nairobi_UnConference: Beyond Data, Beyond Borders brought together a diverse network of stakeholders from Kenya’s social impact ecosystem. As we reflect on the insightful sessions and conversations, here are key ideas to consider based on the survey:

1. Freely Exchanging Ideas and Challenges

• Open Dialogue: The UnConference provided a safe space for nonprofits, social enterprises, and service providers to openly share their experiences, challenges, and innovative ideas. Let’s continue fostering this culture of open dialogue beyond the event.

2. Learning Through Experimentation

• Embrace Curiosity: Nonprofits should view experimentation as an opportunity, not a risk. By testing new approaches, technologies, and data-driven strategies, we can learn and adapt faster. Let’s encourage a mindset of curiosity and continuous learning.

3. Data for Storytelling

• Narratives Matter: Data isn’t just numbers; it’s stories waiting to be told. Nonprofits can leverage data to create compelling narratives that resonate with donors, beneficiaries, and the wider community. Let’s harness data to amplify impact through storytelling.

4. AI-Enabled Chatbots for Social Impact

• Accessible Support: AI chatbots can enhance communication with beneficiaries, answer queries, and provide real-time assistance. Nonprofits should explore integrating chatbots into their programs to improve efficiency and reach.

5. Streamlining Data Management

• Quality Over Quantity: Nonprofits often collect vast amounts of data. Streamlining data management ensures that we focus on relevant, actionable insights. Let’s prioritise data quality and usability.

6. Data Beyond Borders

• Collaboration Across Boundaries: Data knows no borders. Nonprofits can learn from global best practices, adapt them locally, and share their insights with the broader ecosystem. Let’s break down silos and collaborate across borders.

7. Ethical Considerations

• Data Privacy and Consent: Nonprofits must handle data ethically. Prioritise informed consent, protect privacy, and ensure transparency. Let’s build trust with our beneficiaries.

8. Scaling Data-Driven Interventions

• Scaling Smartly: Data-driven interventions can scale impact exponentially. Nonprofits should identify what works, replicate successful models, and adapt them to different contexts. Let’s scale with purpose.

9. Incorporating Local Context

• Context Matters: Data solutions must align with local realities. Nonprofits should involve community members, understand cultural nuances, and tailor data strategies accordingly.

10. Data Justice

• Empowering Communities: Who controls the narrative? Data justice means ensuring that data benefits everyone, especially marginalised communities. Nonprofits should advocate for equitable access and representation.

As we move forward, let’s turn these ideas into action. The Nairobi_UnConference sparked the flame; now let’s keep it burning.

Together, we can drive positive change beyond borders.

Follow-up:

• Part I
• Part III
• Event videos
• Event photos

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Pt. II: Ideas to consider based on the Nairobi_UnConference was originally published in Dabbler on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m familiar with six languages and fluent in one. For years, I felt like that’s been trying to tell me something.

When someone learns I’m Filipino, they often switch to Tagalog. I watch their face do the thing it always does. Warmth first, then a flicker of confusion, then the polite recovery when they see I can’t answer. So I give them the explanation I’ve given a hundred times. My parents stopped speaking it to us after we moved to the States. I was three. They were afraid Tagalog would get in the way of our English.

It’s true. It’s also started to feel like an excuse, because nothing stopped me from going back to learn it as an adult. The regret is real, and it’s specific. I am a Filipino who cannot talk to other Filipinos in the language we were both born into. It should have come easily. I could have been bilingual without trying. Instead, I stand there translating my own absence.

My parents weren’t unusual in this. When the Four Families came over, that was the common reasoning of the time. Speak English at home and the kids will catch up fast. Most of us did exactly that. Some of my cousins and my own sisters were born in the Philippines and can’t speak Tagalog anymore either. One or two in our generation held on. The rest of us gave it up for a head start nobody turned out to need, because we know now what our parents didn’t. A child’s brain has room for more than one language. The worry that Tagalog would crowd out English was a fear, not a fact. A whole cohort handed back its first language to clear room that was already there.

Here’s the part that complicates the story. I am not a man who avoided languages.

Tagalog came first, before memory. English took over at three. In junior high, a Mexican PE teacher offered a Spanish class that wasn’t in the curriculum yet, and I took it, then took Spanish again in high school as my elective and pulled straight A’s. In college, I signed up for Japanese 101 as a freshman and ended up living in Japan for six years, taking private conversation lessons in my spare time. My dorm during those first two years in college was full of Korean students, so I picked up the cadence of Korean and my first taste of kimchi at the same table. Years later, around my wife Caro and the other South American trainees in Japan, I was hearing Castilian Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese in the same afternoon.

Six languages in the air around me across a lifetime. Every opportunity a person could ask for. And I reached real fluency in exactly one.

The one I own is English. The language that was installed over the language I was born speaking.

There’s a memory I keep, and I don’t fully trust what I’ve done with it. In an AP English class, I answered a question and the teacher told me, in front of the whole room, that I was the worst English student she’d ever had. For a long time, I told myself I’ve been proving her wrong ever since. I no longer believe that. It’s a story I built backward to give a shapeless thing a shape. The truth is plainer and stranger. The comment was an ego wound that never fully closed, and I find it interesting that this particular memory, out of thousands, is the one that stayed. I don’t think she made me a writer. I think I just never set this one language down, and I’m not certain why.

There’s a Japanese idea I learned during those years in Matsuyama. “Shuhari”. Three stages of mastery. Shu, where you obey the form and copy it exactly. Ha, where you start to break from it and make it your own. Ri, where you leave the form behind entirely. Every language I touched stalled at shu. I learned the shapes, the polite openings, enough to be a gracious guest. Only English ever moved into ha, the stage where I could break the rules on purpose and have it mean something.

For years, I read that as a personal shortfall. All those opportunities, all that exposure, and only one finish line crossed. The way I think of it now is simpler. Nobody reaches ha in six languages. Depth in one thing is paid for with breadth somewhere else. The question was never why I failed to get fluent. It’s what I traded for the one fluency I have, and whether the trade was worth making. In languages, I am a pure generalist, and I’ve carried that as something close to shame for a long time.

Here’s where it turns over, though.

In the early Japan years, before I could hold a real conversation, I rented Japanese TV dramas on VHS from a shop called Tsutaya. I’d play them in my apartment and rewind the same scene over and over. Not to memorize vocabulary. I was watching for when. When a particular phrase was used and when it wasn’t. The bow that came with it. The half-second of silence before someone spoke. The gesture that did the real work while the words just kept the beat. I wasn’t collecting words. I was collecting context.

That’s the same thing I do behind the decks. Thirty years of DJing is thirty years of reading a room before anyone tells you what it wants, watching when a crowd leans in and when it drifts, feeling the timing under the noise. It’s the Japanese concept of ma, the meaningful space between things, the pause that gives the notes their shape.

So maybe my fluency was never in the words. Maybe it was always in the space underneath them, and the vocabulary was just the surface I skated across on my way to the part I actually understood. I can read a face in a language I can’t speak. I catch the meaning in the pause, the register, the thing the body says while the mouth is busy.

That’s the generous reading. I owe you the other one, too. It’s also possible I never learned the words because reading the room came easily, and the grind of conjugation and flashcards did not. One of those is a gift. The other is avoidance. I genuinely cannot tell you which is true, and I’ve stopped pretending the answer is flattering.

The place this lives now is my in-laws’ table. When I speak Spanish to Caro’s family, I feel like an idiot, so I usually go silent, and then I feel guilty for sitting out the conversation at my own family gathering. There’s one mercy. Caro’s parents grew up in Argentina but carry Japanese heritage, and they speak Japanese. I’m more functionally fluent in Japanese than in Spanish, so over the years I’ve ended up mixing the two, reaching for whatever word lands the meaning regardless of which language it belongs to. A Spanish noun, a Japanese particle, a gesture to cover the gap. My listening, in both, runs years ahead of my speaking. I understand far more than I can say.

Which is the whole thing, really. I have spent a life understanding more than I could say, in language after language, and calling it a failure because I never crossed the line that fluency draws.

The regret about Tagalog stays. It should have been the easy one, and I let it go. That part of the story isn’t resolved, and I’m not going to tidy it into a lesson. But the explanation I hand to strangers has started to feel less like an excuse and more like a description of how I’ve moved through every language I’ve ever met. Standing in the space between, understanding more than I can say, listening for the when.

I’m at shu in five languages and ha in one. Maybe the sixth thing, the reading of rooms and faces and silences, is the one place I finally reached “ri”. I left the form behind so long ago that I forgot it was ever a form.

I’m still in the middle of that thought.

Shu was originally published in Dabbler on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I lived a Japanese mastery arc for decades before I found the word for it. Finding the word showed me where I’d cheated.

By my senior year of college, people I’d barely met were calling me “THE Donn Durante,” with the emphasis on the “Thee.” I didn’t invent the name. I just made sure I never corrected it. What none of them could see was the part of me that was still too scared to walk across a room and start a conversation with a girl. So I built a workaround. If I couldn’t approach them, I’d make myself worth approaching. Resident DJ at the club on Green Street. Head coordinator of the fashion show. The guy doing choreographed routines on stage at Foellinger Auditorium. The reputation did the walking I couldn’t do.

For years, I thought that was the same thing as having arrived. It took me until my fifties, and a Japanese word I should have learned decades earlier, to see the difference.

The word is shuhari (守破離). It comes out of Japanese martial arts, though it started in older places, in noh theater and the tea ceremony, and it describes the three stages of learning anything to the point of mastery. Shu, protect or obey: you copy the master exactly, no deviation, no opinions of your own. Ha, break: once the form lives in your body, you start to vary it, bending the rules you finally understand. Ri, leave or transcend: you let the forms go and make something unmistakably yours.

I lived in Japan for six years, from twenty-one to twenty-seven. I did not bring this word home with me. I found it much later, the way I found most of the words I now reach for, in a book, long after the experience it described. When I read it, I recognized myself immediately. I had run the whole arc as a kid in a church basement on the South Side of Chicago, with no vocabulary for any of it.

The basements were Filipino parties, the dinner-and-dance kind: a DJ or a band and a floor full of adults doing the cha-cha and the Hustle. I was small, watching. By the time I was a teenager, I had a method, though I wouldn’t have called it that. I’d find the older kids whose moves got the biggest reaction, especially from the girls, and I’d memorize exactly what they did. Then I’d go home and practice alone until the steps stopped feeling borrowed.

That is shu, precisely. Copy the master. No improvisation, no ego, just attention and repetition. I have never been embarrassed about that stage, and I think a lot of people are, which is why a lot of people never get good at anything. Copying is not the absence of creativity. It is the rent you pay for it.

DJing started the same way. A family friend named Charlie, a little younger than me but further along, taught me to beat-match two records when I was in high school, around 1989. I copied Charlie. Then I copied every DJ whose set made a room move. Thousands of repetitions, none of them original, all of them necessary.

Ha showed up by accident, the way it usually does. You repeat something enough times that one day your hands do something you didn’t plan, and it works better than the thing you meant to do. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” you think, “but I’m keeping it.” On the floor, I started combining steps, restyling them, making them mine without deciding to.

The clearest version I remember was a DJ battle at the Illini Union, junior year. The other DJs were more technically skilled than I was, and I knew it. So instead of trying to out-scratch them, I opened with Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the slow original, and held it for over a minute while the crowd wondered what I was doing. A friend from Hong Kong had given me a dance remix of the same song. I’d practiced the transition for hours until it was just right, not too abrupt, not too soft, and when the remix finally dropped on the chorus, the room came apart. The judges gave me the highest score for the opening. I lost on everything else. I didn’t have the technical chops. What I had was a feel for the room.

Here is where the arc gets honest, and where I cheated.

Ri looks, from the outside, like a finished person. Original. Untouchable. And looking finished is intoxicating, especially to someone who started out nerdy and scared and scrawny. So I learned to perform the last stage before I had earned it.

In Japan, on a teacher’s salary, I bought a thousand-dollar three-piece Jean Paul Gaultier suit, featuring a vest with braided black leather straps and silver buckles across the open back, just to watch people’s faces when I took my jacket off. I gave girls jewelry from Tiffany’s. I took dates to the restaurant on the top floor of the ANA hotel. I paid for all of it with a Citibank card, maxing out every month and making the minimum payment each month, a loop I kept running until the card started getting declined. Then I borrowed cash from a friend. Then, from one of my adult students, until her husband sat me down for a kind, direct conversation about the fact that this was not okay. I left Japan with no savings. The only thing I shipped home was six years of vinyl, because the records were the one possession I couldn’t be without.

Years later, almost a decade out of college, I paid for a full-page ad in the program of a university fashion show, still half-hoping someone in that room would recognize the legend of “THE Donn Durante.” Nobody did, except my cousins. By then, I was a has-been clinging to the glory days, and I knew it even as I wrote the check. The suit, the persona, the ad: all of it was the look of Ri with none of the substance underneath. Behind the armor was the same scared kid, still in shu, still copying an idea of who he was supposed to be.

What I missed, for a long time, was that real Ri had shown up too, in a place I wasn’t watching for applause.

I keep telling you the other DJs were better, the other dancers more skilled. That is true, and it points straight at the thing I actually got good at. I couldn’t out-technique anyone. But I could read a room. I could feel where the energy was about to break and move before it did. My junior year, the night before my college’s big fashion show, the final rehearsal fell apart. The head coordinator had lost the room, and the whole thing was sliding toward a cliff. Without planning to, I climbed onto the stage, asked for everyone’s attention, and said a few words that pulled everyone back together. That came from the same place the music did: all those reps in the basement and the booth, where nobody was handing out scores. It was the one skill I had genuinely transcended into.

That is the difference I couldn’t see at twenty-five. The performed Ri needed an audience to exist. The real Ri was still there after the audience went home. You can buy the suit. You cannot buy the ten thousand repetitions, and they are the only thing that leaves a residue.

I’m in the middle of this, not past it. I found the word for the arc in my fifties, and the word did two things at once. It described and named something I had genuinely done, and it showed me exactly where I’d skipped to the end and called it mastery.

If you’re early in something right now, copying someone better than you and feeling like a fraud for it, here is what I’d want you to hear: the copying is shu, and shu is where everyone starts. What I’d actually call a mistake was my move, dressing up like the last stage to skip the long middle. The middle is the part that changes you. And the residue it leaves behind is the only version of arriving that stays.

Ri Is What’s Left When the Audience Leaves was originally published in Dabbler on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.