ebonyicons

I wasn’t the aesthetic
I guess, I get it.
So much pressure to appear just like them
Pretty and cosmetic
Elementary, alphabetic
So much pressure to appear just like them.

• Jill Scott

There’s a particular kind of softness people reach for when they look at me. A lowered voice. A tilt of the head. The face you make at something you’ve already decided is broken. I’ve learned to register it before it arrives, the way you learn to feel rain before it comes. One of the ways the world offers to look at a Black non-binary fem at times includes almost reflexively pity. And I want to be clear, with my whole chest: I don’t want it. I never have.

Pity is a verdict dressed up as care. When you pity me, you are not lifting me — you are confirming the floor you’ve decided I’m standing on, and quietly thanking God you’re not down here with me. It needs a below to look at and an above to look from. So when it lands on me, it isn’t telling me about my life. It’s telling me where you think you are in relation to it.

I have spent a lot of my life in the gap between calculation and truth. Calculation is the voice that says be smaller here and it’ll go easier. Soften that, swallow this, round your edges down to something the room can hold. Truth is the thing calculation asks you to set down so you can pick up safety instead. I know that trade intimately. I have made it and I have refused it, and I can tell you exactly what each one costs.

So when I watched JD and Usha Vance sit on CBS Sunday Morning this week and talk about their marriage, their faith, their kids, I wasn’t watching a stranger. I was watching a trade personified that struck me.

Let me be careful, because this isn’t about whether she as a Hindu woman should raise her children Christian, or whether anyone should tell her how to parent. That’s not my business or concern. What I felt watching her wasn’t judgment. It was an ancestral ache — and underneath it, recognition.

Here is what I recognized. She was raised Hindu. He converted to Catholicism in 2019, and they’ve agreed to raise their kids in a Catholic tradition. She’s the one who told him “therapy didn’t work for you; church does.” And last fall, he stood at a Turning Point event and shared his hope that one day she’d be moved to convert too. She sat beside him on that couch and smoothed it over — explained that people had misunderstood, that he isn’t proselytizing to her every day.

I know that smoothing. Not as an idea. In my body. I have sat with those I loved as things were said about me, plainly, that landed like a slap — and watched myself reflexively want to fold it like a napkin, fold it into a joke, translate it into something the table could keep eating through. I called that keeping the peace. I called it being the bigger person. What it was, was me managing the terms of my own diminishment and calling it grace. That is the work I watched Usha Vance do on national television, in a much more expensive dress than I could afford.

This is where I have to separate two things the world loves to blur: a structural understanding, and a personal belief of self.

Structurally, yes. I exist at the bottom of more totem poles than I can count, and I am not naive about it. Usha Vance, as an Asian American cisgendered woman, moves through this country largely shielded from a violence that meets me daily — the kind that gets tolerated, excused, legislated, and ignored. I’m not going to pretend our positions are the same. They are not. The barriers in front of me are real and she does not have to climb them.

But structure is not soul. Where I land on a hierarchy somebody else built is not a statement about my worth, my value, or who I actually am. And this is the thing pity cannot understand: I have never, not once, believed I deserved my designation. Not as a child, not at my lowest, not on the days the world’s verdict feels like the only mirror in the room. I have never co-signed the position assigned to me. I have never tried to escape my category by passing into a more legible one.

That last part is where Usha and I part ways completely.

I am non-binary not only because I am not a man — one of the categories handed to me at birth — but because I am not a woman either. These titles have nothing to do with hormones or genitals or what I’m good at. I reject womanhood the same way I reject manhood: I refuse to leave one cage just to lock myself in another. There was a door marked “woman” and the world along with multiple therapist told me I could squeeze through it for a little more legibility, a little more safety, a little more social capital. I said no. Not because the door was beneath me — but because I wasn’t trying to get caught in anybody’s box on my way out.

And I want to be honest about the cost, because I’m not interested in writing the kind of essay that pretends liberation is free. It isn’t. Defying legibility is expensive. It costs social capital I will never get back. It challenges my own vision for my future more times than I can tell you. And the part that aches the most isn’t the strangers — it’s the people who love me and still can’t quite see me, who keep reaching for an old version, an old way of smoothing, an old shape of me that was never true. To be illegible to the world is one thing. To be illegible to your own kin is another, and it has a particular kind of weight. But here is what’s also true: from the moment I started my own journey toward liberation, I have never regretted it. Not once. The choice is hard. The choice has never been wrong.

What I saw in Usha Vance is the other choice. Calculation over integrity. The arrangement where you fold your inheritance into your spouse’s faith, smile through his public hope that you’ll one day disappear into it entirely, and call the whole thing free will. And here is the part I keep coming back to: you cannot calculate your way out of a structural reality. You can only calculate your way into a smaller and smaller self. The math always runs the same direction. Every concession you make to be more holdable shaves something off, and at the end of it the structure is still standing exactly where it was — only now there’s less of you.

The silence it takes to partner and ascend inside a worldview built on your own second-class standing — that is a humiliation I’m not sure my soul could survive. And I say that not as someone above her. I say it as someone who has been offered that exact bargain, in different clothes, and turned it down every time. When the world tells me what I should do, I choose what I believe. That has cost me. It has also kept me whole in times that didn’t believe I had a choice.

So no, I don’t hate Usha Vance. Not even for her quiet, passive part in the harm she and her husband’s politics are doing to this country. What I feel for her is pity — and I’ll own that it’s the same thing I refuse when it’s pointed at me. The only difference is that mine is honest about its direction. I think accountability will find her spiritually long before it finds her economically. I think the bill for all that smoothing comes due somewhere a paycheck could never reach.

I may be many of the things the world says I am. I may, on plenty of days, feel boxed into whatever it has decided is good enough for me. But there has never been a single moment where I believed I belonged in the box. Where I defended it. Where I tried to trade up to a nicer one and could look in the mirror. And that — not my position on anyone’s totem pole — is the measure I actually trusted over my own.

I know this confuses people. Someone like me — pitying her? In every structurally measurable way, the math doesn’t work. She has the legibility, the marriage, the security, the proximity to power. She does not deserve my pity by any metric the world keeps score with. But pity was never about . It was always about the shrinking.

I am, after all, just a brokie on the internet, and her problems are far beyond my tax bracket. But in 35 years of life, I have never once envied a soul who had to shrink to be seen.