Field Notes

on spotting a they/them in the wild

There are moments in life when the surreal collides with the mundane in such a specific, crystalline way that you can’t help but think: I am definitely the main character right now.

Yesterday, I had one of those moments.

I was at BestBuy, which is not usually where I go to feel feelings. But I’d chipped the screen on my work-work iPad — not to be confused with my personal iPad, because God forbid I accidentally recycle paper covered in sensitive data alongside a to-do list and a sketch of a goose in a hat.

I do my best thinking with a pencil in my hand, which is why I have two iPads, two Apple IDs, and a pile of Apple Pencils that look like they belong to a calligrapher with a digital hoarding problem.

My anxiety — and my overachiever streak — are both strong enough that I’d find myself inventing half-baked encryption schemes, just in case someone found my notes and tried to make sense of them. So I do my plotting and logic work and work-related math on the other iPad.

Anyway. I had dropped the work-work iPad during dinner one night while trying to untangle a logic bug at Longhorn, and now here I was, going through the AppleCare process.¹

So I was at BestBuy, waiting for my twenty-minute pickup appointment at the Genius counter — an appointment slot designed, I assume, to give you time to weep gently while your cloud backup trickles in over their molasses Wi-Fi.

Another customer had the same time slot.

He was early. I was early. That meant twenty full minutes of shared retail limbo.

And that’s when I saw him.

A man — unmistakably a man, not a woman on T, as I heard no frog-voice — in a hot pink onesie.

Not a subtle salmon or dusty rose. Hot pink.

The kind of pink that wants to fight you in the parking lot and then hug you afterward.

On his head: a striped cap, like something a conductor might wear if the train ran exclusively on vibes and LaCroix. Pinned to the front was a button that read “THEY/THEM.”

Here are pictures I took surreptitiously, which is ethically gray at best, but I did take care to blur out his face.

And, honestly, he clearly wants attention. The hot pink isn’t nearly as hot in the photos as it was in person, but that’s fluorescent retail lighting for you.

I stared.

Of course I stared.

Not in a mean way. Not in a “let me speak to the manager” way. But in the way you stare when something unexpected short-circuits your social autopilot and your brain starts firing every reaction it has all at once.

I felt a lot of things.

Rapid-fire, whiplash feelings.

Amusement. Judgment. Confusion. Something adjacent to admiration. Then shame for the judgment. Then a kind of protective instinct I didn’t know I had. Then analysis of all of the above.

Then more judgment. Then more amusement. Then gratitude that my friend Josh wasn’t with me, because the two of us would laugh so hard that they’d probably have assumed we were overdosing on ecstasy and called the cops.

Then a strange, sharp ache.

All this, before my name was even called.

So I did what I always do when my brain starts spinning up a moral tornado: I pulled out the non-work iPad and started taking notes.

This essay is the result.

On Being Too Right

I occasionally find that I know myself well enough to recognize when I’m not just observing something — I’m reacting to it.

And this was one of those moments.

Because no matter how diplomatically I try to phrase it, the very concept of “non-binary” is in fact inherently contradictory.

To call oneself outside the binary is to define oneself by the binary. If you’re “not male or female,” then you are, by definition, referencing maleness and femaleness as your frame.

You’re saying, “That’s the binary — and I’m something else.”

Which is just…a new binary.

A binary between those inside it and those who claim to float above it — “it,” in this case, referring to observable material reality.

It’s like setting up a club for people who aren’t joiners.

And I admit, the illogic of it grates on me.

Not in an academic way — I’m not here clutching a philosophy degree and hissing “category error!” into my sleeve — but in the way a math brain itches when someone insists that pi is exactly three.

It’s not just incorrect. It’s aggressively incorrect.

And worse, it’s worn like a badge of moral superiority.

That’s the part that hits a nerve.

The posturing. The quiet smugness of it all — as if adopting “they/them” pronouns and draping yourself in conceptual vagueness makes you more enlightened than the rest of us plodding along with our clunky chromosomes and literal language.

In my darker moments, I want to lean in and say: “Your entire identity collapses under the law of non-contradiction. You are defined by the structure you claim to transcend. You are the moon insisting it doesn’t orbit. Also, you’re a jackass.”

And I’m right. I know I’m right.

But I’m too right.

Because when being right makes you mad, it’s not about logic anymore. It’s about ego.

If I were less insecure — if I didn’t have this hair-trigger response to intellectual sloppiness parading as moral virtue — I’d probably just roll my eyes and move on.

But I don’t.

I get activated.

And when I get activated, I start writing essays like this one.

Performance Art

What unsettled me most wasn’t the outfit. It was the recognition.

He was performing. That much was obvious.

A hot pink onesie in public isn’t fashion. It’s theater. Add a pronoun pin and you’re not just in costume — you’re casting yourself in a role.

And from what I could tell, he knew it. He wasn’t oblivious. He wasn’t muttering or folding into himself or keeping his eyes down.

He took up space. He moved like someone who expected and wanted to be seen.

And here’s the part that lodged in my throat: I do it too.

I don’t wear neon jumpsuits. But I perform. Constantly.

My therapist has been pointing it out for years, like a patient scientist observing a subject who keeps running the same self-defeating maze.

“You know,” he said once, with the faux-gentleness of someone saying something he knows will draw blood, “you earn your friendships by being useful. That’s how you survive relationships. You become indispensable.”

And the awful thing is: he’s right.

It gets murky because I like being helpful. It’s not fake. I have a real knack for solving problems across a weirdly broad array of domains.

I’m not a specialist. I’m a Swiss Army knife with unusually sharp blades.

And when you can actually help — when your skillset is broad enough that you’re a legit 7 or 8 at fifty different things — you start to confuse service with identity.

You think, this is just who I am. But it’s not. It’s who I had to become.

This year, I stopped doing the Super Helpful routine. And guess what?

My therapist was right again.

He warned me. He named names. He looked me in the eye and said: “When you’re no longer useful, you will be lucky to hear from (name) once a year.”

I remember sitting on his couch, staring down at my embroidered Chuck Taylors, resenting the hell out of him for having the balls to say it.

But he wasn’t cruel. He was right.

And it has happened exactly the way he said it would.

So when I looked at this man in his ridiculous, radiant pink, with his neat little They/Them badge and his lack of apology, what I felt wasn’t just judgment. It wasn’t just analysis or logic or superiority.

It was resentment.

He was out there — not just being himself, but owning it. Loudly. Proudly. Unapologetically.

And of course, it may be the case that he’s broken in some private way I didn’t see. Maybe he hates himself and the costume is a shield — something he can point to when people dislike him, so the rejection feels principled instead of personal.

I’ve known people like that. I’ve been people like that.

But that’s not the sense I got.

The sense I got was that he enjoys being himself.

And the truth is, I mostly don’t.

I’m better than I was. But I still wear performance like a second skin. And when I start to peel it off — when I stop earning my place through utility — people vanish.

So maybe what pissed me off was the possibility that he’s further along than I am.

That he’s done trying to be useful. That he’s just…being.

And that maybe, in some quiet, defiant, flamingo-pink way, he’s freer than me.

What Is Mine

After I left BestBuy, I went home and finished a drawing of a mailbox.

It’s for one of the thank-you postcards I’ve been sending — hand-drawn notes to the people who bought my original drawings, and to those who’ve placed multiple print orders.

They’re not slick. Not polished. Just pencil, paper, and a little color. A pop of red for the flag.

I send them because I want to. Because I’m grateful.

And because this is the first time in my life I’ve had something — something I enjoy that’s making me some financial headway — that feels like it’s actually mine.

Not just something I’m good at. A place where I perform competence in exchange for belonging — yes, that too. But also something rooted.

Substack has never felt like that. This has always been a place where I take my usual process of figuring out what I think, writing, put some of it in public, and let readers come along for the ride. The closest it ever gets to feeling like a “product” is when I write a book review.²

But the art? The prints? The thank-you postcards?

That feels like a different kind of signal.

I drew the mailbox carefully. Quietly. No flourish. No branding.

Just a box on a post with the flag lifted — an ordinary object made deliberate.

And as I shaded the curve of the metal, I realized something: I wasn’t performing. That part of my brain, the anxiety-ridden observer doing the constant utility calculus, was silent.

I was just making something.

Something real.

Something mine.

And maybe that’s why the man in pink shook me.

Because for all his theater, he really didn’t seem like he was auditioning.

He looked like someone who had already cast himself.

And that’s when I had to admit something else.

For all the bullshit the Woke have wrought in this culture — and it is bullshit, sometimes deeply damaging bullshit — it’s almost too easy to resent them. I do resent them.

My most-read essays are takedowns of their ideology, their overreach, their cruelty dressed up as care. I have legit haters, including some that have required police reports.

But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some bullshit Saint Holly narrative baked in.

Look at me, bravely opposing these cultural jackasses.

Look at me, standing up for truth and clarity and the possibility of shared meaning.

Look at me, in my aggressive attachment to reality and the immutability of my XX chromosomes.

And okay — yes. That’s part of it.

But there’s something else there too.

Something even less noble.

Because the people I’m railing against? Some of them are just flailing humans trying to cope with their own mess.

And if I’m really, really honest?

A few of them might be handling their mess better than I’m handling mine.

They’ve built community. Created aesthetic. Claimed space.

I sit in therapy talking about the friends I lost when I stopped being Super Helpful.

They go to brunch in pink onesies and let strangers hate them for fun.

And…I don’t know what to do with that.

I just know it complicates my sense of moral clarity.

And maybe that’s the whole point.

Maybe clarity is overrated.

Maybe the better question is: what can I make that’s mine?

What can I make that’s not a performance or a protest, but a signal?

One quiet but undeniable.

Like a red flag lifted on a mailbox.

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PRINTS FOR SALE

My DIY student loan exorcism is ongoing. Prints now available include this red Radio Flyer wagon, a Halloween owl, and President Trump’s moment of defiance in the face of would-be assassination. There’s also a pay-what-you-want option for a Texas bluebonnet. Details and ordering info here.

1. Pro tip: always buy AppleCare. Apple doesn’t fix iPad screens. They replace the whole damn device, like a high-tech Marie Kondo tossing your broken shit into the void. It’s brutal, efficient, and worth every penny.

2. Speaking of which, for paid subs — I’ll have Kamala Harris’s book reviewed the day it drops, probably before breakfast. A bitchy, no-holds-barred snarkfest. You’re welcome!