Thanks for reading.
Mortality, Cats, Love, Self
The Furry Journey I'm On
by ex_mortis/Robin the Cat, 6.14.26 (amended 6.26.26)
(this will display weird on almost any device, i apologize but the web design sort of isn't the point)
There's a story in my family that when my mom's water broke she woke up on her bed in the back bedroom of my grandma's house surrounded by cats. "They knew." My grandma had two or three permanent cats, but these weren't them, they were just... cats. She had some weird understanding where strays could just come and go as they please, give birth, and move on. Hard for me to imagine living like that. There's a half dozen photos of me not even a year old, on all fours on that same bed with a half dozen kittens. They're just passing through. I look really happy.
I grew up more of a cat person than a human person. I had more cats than friends, and we lost a lot of those cats before we started keeping them indoors. Ghost, King, Video, Cutes, even the crusty bastard Biff eventually got hit. The three who made it to old age were Buffy, Max, and later Ash (aka Girl). I loved them, but, I know now it was in kind of an immature way. Almost antagonistic, like Elmyra off Tiny Toons. Only when it's convenient. Don't keep me up at night purring on my bed. After my parents split up my dad took Buffy, and the last time I spent the night with her she got right up there purring away, even though she hadn't seen me in a while, fucked up and old as she was. I laid there crying, regretting ever kicking her off.
I'm writing this now because I was thinking in the bath: if I could do my life over, would I change some of the choices that led to me being really damaged? Particularly around my impossibly beautiful but abusive girlfriend and relocating for the scam degree mill video game school. The answer is no, no matter what, because these experiences led me to Vincent Price. I wouldn't have been where I was, I wouldn't have been pushed to adopt this cat that looked like he was going to die of old age or cat AIDS in the next fifteen minutes. In spite of some early scares he blossomed and filled out and we spent 14 years together. Vincent taught me what love is, what love could be. We had the closest friendship possible without speaking the same language. It's from Vincent that I get my fursona's long belly fur and deep croaky meow.
After Vincent passed, I got involved with local feral cats that happened to have a colony in my backyard. Feeding, building shelters, helping trap kittens, and so on. Naturally, I experienced a bizarre and ultimately hurtful fellowship with the local crazy cat lady around this. The cats in my immediate locality I named Boss, Black, Pretty, Dirt, and Grey. Grey I think was not born feral but abandoned by transitory college students, and I was able to take her in. We had a very good relationship for a short time (in the cosmic sense) before she ran away. I think I will struggle until the day I die to not blame myself for letting her go. From Grey I get my fursona's clipped ear, because that's a way they mark ferals to avoid spaying or neutering them multiple times. I also get to say it's representative of me being either abandoned or saved, whatever I need at the moment.
It was a few years before I let myself cat again. A friend of the family took in a stray carrying a secret load of kittens. They were all grey but one, this black boy, they said he wasn't socializing well. He didn't like people. Well, he took to me immediately, and that's how I met Bob Howard. I'm proud of how he's grown up, completely unterritorial, completely nonviolent, a little spoiled, but that's okay. I took my fursona's main color from Bob. Slightly modified for art's sake, "almost" black.
I've never been particularly interrogative or experimental about my identity. When I heard what bisexual was I recognized I was attracted to the girls at school and the boy next door and I just said, oh, that's what I am. Okay. I didn't really hear about "furry" until the aughts on the internet. It looked stupid, it looked deviant, it looked silly, because that's how it was presented to outsiders, by outsiders. Couldn't be me.
Robin the Cat was developed during a relationship with a furry partner. We played around with the idea in a kink way and it just sort of stuck in an identity way. I've always had problems with human connection and guilt around attraction; to see people's fursonas, these sexed up selfmade personality bombs, feels welcoming to me. Once a therapist asked me "are you comfortable in your body?" I think because I was squirming on the couch or something. I dunno, man, it's the only one I got. Now I have one that feels more right, more comfortable, more attractive, more like myself, if only just in my mind. When the relationship ended, I struggled for a few days with the concept of furriness. I thought the only sensible thing to do was drop this new part of myself altogether. Finally I decided to double down on it, just embrace it and be fully out about it.
There's a scar on Robin's neck that, again, came about as part of a kink thing with my partner. Even after deciding to embrace "furry" I went back and forth on erasing the scar from the design. Everything about this character, this fursona, represents something about me, whether something in my nature or external forces that changed me. The wound isn't any different; it's something I'll carry forever. Things that hurt, things I have a hard time being proud of... it's easier to channel these into a cat boy I think is hot than it is to accept myself the way I am. But maybe that's the same thing.