furry! —w—

I like fur! it’s really pleasant to the touch.
- if I could, I would hug out all the cats in the world. unfortunately I’m allergic to cats, but at least I can imagine the enjoyment.
  - actually, I do hug my parents’ cats somewhat regularly when I visit them. it’s just that I get a rash 5 minutes after hugging them to my face
- honestly, it makes me think life would be a lot more pleasant if at least some of us had fur irl. so why don’t we?
  - biology, evolution, and all that boring stuff of course…
  - thankfully on the Internet, anything goes. I can imagine. I can create. I can be whatever I want to be.
this dance is like a weapon of self-defense against the present tense
- realising my love of fur has been a huge source of internal conflicts for some time.
  - overcoming fear of the unknown isn’t exactly the most easy or pleasant mental exercise.
- but being able to imagine I’m a humanoid cat lets me not worry about actual deficiencies of my body.
  - I was born with atopic dermatitis, and my skin has always been a source of problems.
    in early childhood I’d get horrible rashes, sometimes so painful and graphic I do not want to describe them here.
    especially before doctors recommended me good emollients to moisturise my skin with. my atopic dermatitis manifests itself as intense itching and skin dryness; moisturising is important in making it bearable
    some kids would ask me “what happened to you?” out of curiosity. I’d respond “nothing, it’s just my illness.”
    nowadays I take experimental meds which lower the symptoms to a manageable level. I actually started liking how I look after I started undergoing treatment. probably because my skin isn’t inflamed all the damn time, so I can shift my focus from my face feeling red hot to actually appreciating how it looks.
I view being a furry not as a rejection of my body, but rather as an augmentation of it.
- this is more or less why my fursona is so mundane. it’s just me with cat features —w—
  - I have an anime human-looking face rather than a snout. I think it’s cuter that way :3
    technically anime-style faces do resemble snouts slightly; they’re just very short. (how fitting for a cat.)
- there are lots of cool things about the human body. the motor skill of your hands is kind of insane. unless you have some disability of course.
  - but the customisation options are just so boooring! everybody looks pretty much the same.
    you get to customise your shape and color of your hair, but not the size and placement of your ears, or the level and color of your floof?
    human floof so ugly and coarse —w—
    and you don’t even get a cute tail that constantly gets caught on closing doors OW FUCK
    all the other animals have those, so why not us?
    like I know they’re not practical from a hunter-gatherer sort of standpoint, but we live in a society.
I’ll admit my first conscious exposure to furries was not the most normal thing in the world.
- we were playing Geometry Dash with a friend at school, and we encountered a level that had some furry porn in it
  - I was a pretty non-assertive kid at the time, so I conformed to his reactions (basically disgust.)
    except… later I thought about it, and the more I let the idea of a furry sink in, the more I liked it. yet the more I thought about that thing (ugh) we encountered, the more I hated myself for thinking furries were cool.
    that’s probably what led to me being anti-furry for a good while.
so wanting to be a furry built up in me for 5–6 years. (it started around 2017–2018)
- the tipping point was after I played Deltarune and really liked Ralsei. “is it wrong to like a furry character from a game?”
  - still my favourite fluffy kindboy —w—
- a few months later… I stumbled upon this blog post from soatok and it made me realise just how fucking deep I was in my anti-furry Mariana trench.
  - why of course furries are not harmful you dumbass! what even made you think that?
  - maybe it’s time to swim out of there before the pressure crushes you?
soon enough I thought, “hehehehe *mydli* *mydli* let’s have some fun with my online identity!”

I started this website.
- at first I didn’t mention anything about being a furry. I started using Ralsei as my online avatar and persona, because he’s a pretty aesthetically pleasing character. not wanting to steal other people’s art, I also started drawing around that time.
- a few months later, I slowly started crawling out of my shell and hittin’ truth. I added a little branch to the treehouse mildly suggesting I was a furry to people who were curious enough to click around, and finally, over a year later, in September this year I came out with a fursona.
  - as of writing this I’m still not displaying it very proudly on my website (my drawing skills are a constant work in progress!) but having it as my profile pic everywhere puts me at ease. —w—
I feel a lot more comfortable saying this now:
- I am a furry, and I’m proud of it!
  - I am doing
    no harm

furry! —w—

I am a furry, and I’m proud of it!