keirFoxAll furries remember the moment the two neurons that shouldn't have connected in our head reached out and fused together anyway when we were aged somewhere between 11 and 13.
I spent so many years collecting fox stuff. So, so much fox stuff.
My room quickly became a shrine to foxes. I couldn't help but smile every time I saw one and collecting images of them was something incredible to me for some reason.
A friend of mine called me the day before we were supposed to go to a waterpark together the next day one summer and told me he was going to bring me a magazine he got that had an article about foxes and that it had a bunch of pictures.
I couldn't sleep that night.
Damn I was a weird kid.
Still a weird adult.
Lappi the Bard Fox!
FrazzledWings 
đŚ@keirFox i feel called out
@FrazzledWings Hey, at least most people are younger than I am. I had no furry material to go to -- I ended up just becoming obsessed with real foxes for a while before newsgroups directed me to furry stuff a couple years later.
Zorin =^o.o^=@keirFox I remember wondering why I was crushing on so many animal cartoon characters, and why I was the ONLY one in my peer group doing so.
@keirFox Also, after being made fun of it a bit I decided to keep those crushes to myself. Years later, finding a whole freaking fandom of people on the internet that were into this was an amazing experience.
@zorinlynx Thank god for the internet, huh? I'm lucky I stumbled across alt.fan.foxes which took me to alt.fan.furry as early as I did.
@zorinlynx So, I kind of wonder about this -- because I feel like I was wired for this *really* early in life. Like, I'm sure this has been a thing for me forever. I remember the day the "fox thing" hit me though and I was...11 or so.
Before then I was way more into animation than other kids but after that moment I crushed on anthropomorphic stuff quite a lot and... no one else did.
@keirFox Yeah, same here. I mean, I first saw the Heathcliff cartoon in like.. 1986 or 87, since my earliest memories of it were after a family move around then, and I remember crushing hard on Cleo. So around 9-10 years old.
Long before it would be anything beyond an innocent childhood crush. So maybe it is hardwired somehow!
@zorinlynx I don't understand it, I wish I understood it, but I'm glad I have it.
Frost, wolf of winter đşđ
@keirFox @zorinlynx Not anthropomorphic, but I've been a wolf for a LONG time. Thought I was alone.
(and I mean that literally! Transspecies here.)
Matty Zero, foxalicious enby@keirFox âyeahâŚyeah, I didnât kiss it, either, when no one was lookingâ
so much fox stuff, my god
@zerofox Oh I would love to hear your story.
@keirFox little kid me trying to understand why I wanted to kiss both Maid Marian đ˘đŻđĽ Robin HoodâŚhmmm thatâs weird
Knowing zilch about the game Inherit the Earth, but saving up for it because, well, I needed it for some reasonâŚhuh, odd
Having constant dreams where I would just wake up one day and be a fox. I think that goes all the way back to elementary school, and has always been there sinceâŚwonder what that means?
@zerofox Same. If it had a fox, I had to have it be it book, magazine, computer game, or movie. I will never understand what it is about them, but they were such an important part of my youth. Similar dreams, too - stuff that was really powerful and vivid.
Would never have thought just how much of an impact they would have on my life all these years later!
@keirFox being a fox in my own head, I could explore my own gender and sexuality and weird personality traits in a safe space. I had no idea that furries were even a thing until college. Itâs wild, how simply knowing that there are others out there with a shared experience and that I wasnât alone did so, so much to quell lifelong overbearing anxiety. Lol I mean, the anxiety is still there, but I can manage it now 
@zerofox Mine was all about being raised in a household that did not permit me to be a child or express myself. So foxes were, eventually, a way to experiment with letting the emotional parts of me that were prohibited out to the world.
They didnât start out that way, though, and I will never understand why I became so impossibly attached to them. One day a switch flipped and my brain was like âthat, right there. Those colors, that pattern, those wits, that form, that ability to survive. Letâs be obsessed with that and daydream about them all the time.â
@keirFox geez, that just all sounds so familiar. I wasnât allowed to express who I truly was eitherâthere was one template I was supposed to follow, and lol it was not who I actually was at all
Itâs an odd thing to say, maybe, but I felt more like I was playing pretend going through the day acting like the person that others said I had to be, than when Iâd spend time off being a little fox in my little made-up fox world. That felt, if not more real, at least more a lot more honest
@zerofox Oh this is familiar, yeah. I think that was something critical for me - for some reason the âfox versionâ of me was allowed to be more genuine and expressive than actual me. It was more acceptable and much easier. This was even more of a thing once I was on FurryMUCK and could interact with others. It became an incredibly important method of getting the real me out in the world with no risk - there were no repercussions for âgetting it wrongâ and it allowed me to be social in ways so much more honestly than I was ever comfortable with in âreal lifeâ.
Itâs so damn strange how it worked out and how important of a thing it became in my life. I wonât ever forget just how intense my emotions were towards foxes in those early years - for whatever reason they really called to me.
RedstoneLP2@RedstoneLP2 Hello, fox. :)
@keirFox i is no fox.
digitalfox@keirFox "Roleplaying" (we didn't know it was that at the very young age) with the neighborhood kids as Sonic characters, and I wound up being Tails because I had an engineering inclination.
And things have just grown from there, thankfully with supportive family and friends.
Ritzga@keirFox bobs burgers <3
FurriesAtLarge@keirFox When I was a tween, I saw an ad for Kraft Mac and Cheese featuring Cheesasaurus Rex. I definitely developed a crush on him from there. :3
Johannes Silverfox đŚ@keirFox Iâve always been obsessed with foxes whether I realized it or not. And even during the time where I was pretending to be straight/ignore furry, I still had a massive fox fixation that kept popping up in whatever I was doing.
Itâs so much better now that I can do all of this openly without it being a guilty secret to myself.
James@keirFox I was having funny feelings WELL before I was 11!
HawkWolf (H. A. Kirsch)Weirdly enough for me it was kind of a fox that very initially did it.
đŚ đ¸Faux around & find outâ ď¸đ´ó §ó ˘ó łó Łó ´ó ż@keirFox
My gawd⌠I have a followingâŚ
My gawd⌠I have a followingâŚ