So as you guys may have seen, I took Joseph my skunk out of my pfps for most of my socials and changed my username to be my first name. I kinda wanna elaborate to clear any confusion. Maybe some of you will resonate with me, or not……


I created Joseph at a time when I was still heavily involved in the Esports community, and miserable with my social life and crippled by anxiety. Joseph was a way for me to get away from gaming and into furry culture and express my love for skunks, an animal that is incredibly and woefully misunderstood by most people, even by many furries.
Let’s just be clear…. in the real world, skunks don’t stink, they don’t spray as a joke, nor for sport, and they are not as skittish or as quick to use their defense mechanism as you might think.
The reason why this is important is because I wanted Joseph to be a way to show what skunks can really be like and not play into the stereotype that people praise them for, but my longing for identity in the fandom and desire to be seen led me to such anyway and I made a laughing stock out of myself and my skunk oc to let people know I was not insecure about any of these things. To some extent this was healthy, because I did open myself up more to people through the experience, but it was more out of retaliation to my past self that I did it rather then a true means of growing as an individual, I wanted to belong, and I was letting myself do anything I could to feel that way.


Well, unfortunately 2023 happened, which was the year that I labeled myself as “the happy, jolly, nerdy skunk” who loved Reese’s Puffs and stunk and that was my entire shtick and people loved it, everyone except….. Me.
See, because this was the first year I started to really get out of my shell, and pursuing genuine friendships with good people, I began to learn really quickly who were the people that had interest in who I was and people who were interested in who Joseph the skunk was, and suddenly it was like all the work I did to fashion an identity for myself in the fandom was coming back to bite me. This all reared its ugly head when I attended Anthrocon in 2023 and ended my final night of the con having an anxiety attack alone in my hotel room and sobbing uncontrollably. Now does that sound like someone who’s happy or jolly to you? I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone for most of the con, because deep inside I was still insecure about who I was. I was deluded by a fantasy I created that being Joseph the skunk and all the stereotypes was gonna help me make friends.


Now I’ve long since healed from a lot of this, praise God I don’t get anxious like I used to. And I’ve since taken down Joseph as my sona, do not play into any stereotypical humor (albeit it still amuses me from time to time) and I have asked my local furs to stop calling me “Skunk.” The reason I bring any of this up now is because lately I’ve noticed I am not really happy drawing Joseph, nor am I happy sharing fursuit pics of him online. That and people still come and make comments such as about my smell (keyword “my”) or how I am super cute and adorable (keyword “I”) and play into the fantasy that I am perpetually some cartoon character that is there for their entertainment. If any of you have gotten to know me in the last two years, you will know I am very articulate, intellectual, honest, and I won’t satisfy people’s ideas about me just to feel accepted by them.
Every single comment like this I see is just a reminder of this person I was that fantasised these things and pretended they were me, and it’s like reliving a socially anxious period again and again and again. Then when I try and try and explain to people on the subject, they usually either… A. Do not understand B. Proceed to keep making comments anyway and/or C. double down, some of whom have claimed I’m overly sensitive, you can imagine my frustration.


Though I can’t exactly blame people for it, it’s more of a problem with the culture of the fandom and how we twist affinity to conform to our own ideal world. We take characters, we objectify them, we make them out to be perfect creatures in our eyes and we do this to other people and their characters without realizing it and without realizing the consequences. I have done this too sadly, more times than I’d like to admit.
A lot of you might say “why care so much about what others think” but I feel this undermines the vast sum of individuals that seek external validation through their sona, their art, their work, ect. You may or may not be surprised to learn that a lot of people who post frequently online, especially when it’s personal, are very lonely individuals, and their ego feeds off of the echo chamber or otherwise affirming comments social media delivers them. It's nothing but a fantasy, but one that feels so deceptively real that one will live it out until they end up like I did, alone in a place they are broken inside and not a single human being can come to their rescue. I’ll never forget how I felt on the last night of AC’23, that memory exists as a reminder of all the emotional baggage I left behind, and am still leaving behind


But I digress… anyway, Joseph the skunk is not leaving nor do I plan to stop fursuiting nor rename myself or my brand or anything. I can’t really do much about the comments people will make, but I at least… I wanna love drawing my skunk again. Make no mistake, skunks are my favorite animal, and I have so much joy and passion for them that I would love to share with y’all. I’m not really sure how I’m gonna do that at the moment so at least not seeing Joseph’s face every time I log in will help me out for the time being. I’m not attached to my other characters the way I‘m attached to Joseph, because they were all created after I left the esports community. But yeah…. That’s that. I suppose we'll just see how it goes from here…