You're right; it does sound distant when you're talking about a specific person with a well-defined personality (as opposed to, for example, a hypothetical person of no specific gender used to illustrate a... well, an example, although I was trying to avoid using the same noun twice in one sentence), which is a problem I neglected to think of.

I'm honestly not sure what I'd do to solve that if I was going for recognizability; I'd want to use 'e', but would be concerned about the reader not understanding it or about it seeming unfamiliar and hard to relate to. "She'he" is more obviously recognizable, but it seems to me like a term that would be more appropriate for someone who's both genders at once than whose gender is indeterminate, and the length of it is kind of jarring to someone who's used to pronouns being shorter than that.

"S/he" also occurred to me as a more compact version of "she'he", but only "she" and "he" are easily combined that way. Perhaps you could combine it with the shi and hir system someone mentioned above?