1) First, long ass post ahead
2) Any spoilers on this post are most likely images and most of them are likely to be at least slightly NSFW you've been warned I'm not going to mark them individually this is your blanket warning.
3) If any terms such as furfag or other negative terms come up in the comments I'm going to do something I've never done before and ban you from my blog this is not an easy topic for me to talk about publicly don't ridicule it.
In a way it all starts with this image
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But at the same time I must also back up and go into how I arrived at this point. I've followed a number of artists that draw furries and anthros on deviantart for quite some time now and I've always liked the freedom that they are able to express through this artform. I never really participated in it until recently when a few of my friends started actually calling me "Kitty" in conversation because I act so much like a cat.
I am ADD I get hyper and distracted easily, I can sleep anywhere and for long periods of time. I can sleep through anything, I hear extremely high pitched noises and I'm shy at first then extremely friendly. I act so much like a cat that some of my friends like to tease me about it. So this plus my fascination with this type of art has brought me into looking into it myself.
I originally stayed rather traditional I tried to draw myself in several different ways as a cat varying from an actual cat to a more neko style of a human with ears and a tail. I couldn't get any of these really to "click." Looking at them and drawing them they just didn't feel right. And as a result the initial results were extremely poor:
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Initially I chalked this up to having little practice with figure drawing or drawing in this style. So as an artist my next response was that I needed more practice. I was surfing through images that I have on my computer because I keep a decent number of "interesting" images for the sakes of trying to draw when I found a bunch of wallpapers I came across while looking for the old TSL DOWN DOWN DOWN wallpaper. They were posted by DoctorHelvetica and I remember initially looking through the folder of women and being disgusted. I'll expand on this in a moment.
Upon looking through these again I found a few that were interesting to look at from an artistic point of view and I started trying to draw them while making them a "furry." And while drawing these females the one posted above just seemed to click in my mind the way that the other male attempts did not. Now this brought up a whole new issue about gender male female and all of that. I came to realize that drawing myself as a cat doesn't express anything since I already act so much like one so I started drawing her as a fox instead.
The original image I was "converting" into the image above.
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But when I finished it I took a long time just staring at it and wondering to myself about what this image might mean to me. I have a strong connection with my female side, online when my voice isn't readily available or my username is not clearly male or female people tend to assume that I'm female. Back when online roleplaying wasn't just about sex and there was real roleplaying on games such as Dark Age of Camelot I had an easier time playing female characters. People generally found me more engaging and interesting to roleplay with when I played a female rather than a male so the concept of myself being female when it comes to drawing came to express something about my personality and thus became more meaningful.
I decided that I would make the "switch" and represent myself as a female when it came to drawing myself as a fox; because it does so clearly express something inside of me that I have a hard time expressing otherwise. There is a sizable portion of my identity that is clearly female in nature, the way I am drawn to people is more traditionally female about connecting with them on an emotional level instead of the initial physical attraction. Though the female side never has drawn me to be attracted to males it is as if I am a male that goes through relationships like a female while trying to have relationships with females. This leads to problems in that they think I am being phony and only trying to be falsely kind in order to get what I want but it is who I am and it is time to accept that fact.
So basically I have arrived back to where I started, I have come to realize that a major portion of my Identity is female and that it's time for me to embrace it instead of denying it. As I start down this artistic journey of trying to learn a new style of drawing it has also become rather emotional for me as it is now about embracing something within me and finding a way to express it. So the image of the female fox is the end of a realization and the beginning of a journey and I'm unsure where it will take me. The female side of me is what caused such revulsion while looking through the folder of wallpapers labeled "Bitches" because in many of them their face is not shown focusing only on certain parts of their body, or they are naked in provocative poses and generally just demeaning towards women in general and now I realize this is partly the female inside of me lashing out at the way that they are portrayed.