The Westin O’Hare Has Taught Me More About Humanity Than Most Books

I teach iPEC coaching modules at the Westin O’Hare in Chicago. It’s a big, busy hotel attached to one of the largest conference centers in the country, and for fifteen years I’ve been walking through its lobby on the way to my classroom. In that time, I have shared an elevator with a nine-year-old in full stage makeup, a man in a Speedo so small it qualified as suggestion rather than garment, a six-foot-tall fox, and a guy in a suit going to a pharmaceutical conference. All in the same elevator. All on the same Saturday morning.

This is the Westin O’Hare. On any given weekend, the lobby contains entire universes that have nothing to do with each other, and somehow they all need coffee at the same time.

I was a dance mom for years, so the dance competitions don’t surprise me anymore. What you see at the hotel is the visible tip of an iceberg of 5 a.m. departures, hot glue gun injuries, and entire weekends spent in a Marriott bathroom rhinestoning a costume that will be worn for ninety seconds. Yes, I know the cultural punchline. Abby Lee Miller. Reality TV. Dance Moms. And sure, some of us are insufferable. But most of us were just moms who drove four hours before sunrise to watch our kid do something she loved. The first time I watched my daughter hold up a trophy with that specific kind of pride only a kid can wear — the pride of I did the thing and I did it well — I cried in a hotel hallway. I’d judge me for that, except I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The bodybuilders were the first group I had to consciously unclench my face about. They walk through the lobby bronze, oiled, and barely clothed, and your instinct is to make a joke. I finally just asked one of them, in the elevator, why the oil and the tan. He told me: under the stage lights, even the most sculpted physique looks flat. The oil and the dark tan are the only way the judges can see the muscle definition you spent six months earning. These people lived on chicken and broccoli for half a year so that an audience could see, for eight minutes on a stage, what their body was capable of. The Speedo is not vanity. It’s a uniform. I have never looked at a bodybuilder the same way since.

The Furries took the most work. I’ll be honest — they were the group I had the most preconceptions about, because the media has done a thorough job of telling us a story that turns out to be mostly wrong. So I went looking, and then I asked. Here’s what I learned: the elaborate animal costume — the “fursuit” — is the visible tip of what is overwhelmingly a creative arts community of artists, writers, costume-makers, and storytellers. Most furries don’t even own a suit. The character each person creates, called a fursona, is almost always an idealized or hidden version of themselves — a way of expressing parts of their personality they don’t otherwise get to show. Researchers at the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, who’ve been studying this community for over a decade, found that the fandom is disproportionately made up of people who didn’t fit in elsewhere first — often neurodivergent, often LGBTQ+, often bullied as kids — and who finally found a community that said come as you are, or come as whoever you want to be. The costume isn’t hiding them. For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve ever felt safe enough to be seen. That reframe knocked something loose in me.

And then there was the dad. Walking from the hotel toward the conference center with his pre-teen daughter, both of them in full anime costume, deep in a conversation about which characters mattered most to them and why. I watched them and I thought: this is a father who chose to step into his daughter’s world rather than make her shrink to fit his. In a culture where dads periodically disappear into work or into hobbies away from their kids, this guy showed up. In costume. To talk about characters with the kid he made. I almost stopped them just to tell him he was doing it right.

Here is what fifteen years in that hotel lobby has taught me. The thing we are tempted to call weird is almost always passion — passion for a craft, a fandom, a sport, a story, a person — and passion is the most countercultural thing left. We live in a moment where caring about something with your whole chest has been rebranded as cringe. Where the safest posture is irony, distance, the raised eyebrow. Where it is somehow more socially acceptable to mock something than to love it.

And here’s the part I want to sit with, because it’s the harder truth: when we sneer at someone else’s passion, we are almost never telling on them. We are telling on ourselves. The judgment is a tell. It usually means we don’t have a passion of our own anymore — or we did once, and somewhere along the way someone told us it was stupid, and we believed them, and we put it down. The cynicism we wear so easily is armor. It is what people put on after they got laughed at for loving something.

So the invitation isn’t be nicer to weirdos. Aren’t we all weirdos? The invitation is harder than that.

What did you used to love, before you learned to be embarrassed about it?

Find that thing. Pick it back up. Then go ride the elevator at the Westin O’Hare with the rest of us — the dance moms, the bodybuilders, the furries, the anime dads, and me — and see if you can spot what we all have in common.

It’s not the costumes. It’s that we still care.