Okay! I really feel the desire to do some explaining.
If you're reading this and had become friends with me through FA or Discord or Telegram or BlueSky or X (😖) before I disappeared at the end of March, you remember the journal I wrote then explaining why I was leaving then. https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11099997/

Allow me to share some background information about myself.
I have grown up in a very spiritual family. Note that I don't say religious. My family are very much the evangelical Christian type, and there's a great wariness of the word "religion" in this circle of Christianity. I still consider myself a Christian but I am breaking with my parents on some matters, especially at the intersections of faith, politics and sexuality. My parents are pretty conservative (especially my dad, who actually happens to be a pastor) and against anything they would describe as NSFW/pornographic. I wouldn't say that they consider NSFW stuff in furry, LGBTQ, and/or kinky realms to be necessarily "worse" than more "mainstream porn" or whatever, because it's all equally unacceptable in their eyes. I'm not saying this to stir up hate for my parents, I'm just explaining why I if I wanna be a furry and do the things around here that I wanna do, I have to figure out a way to keep it secret from them, and that's not easy because they know I'm into certain stuff. Please don't give them any space in your head if you're gonna be mad at them. They only want the best for me, at least the way they see that. And of course I still love them and want to have the best relationship possible with them. Please don't hate on my parents. They have nothing to do with you at the end of the day.

That being said, I want to tell my story, so to speak. I don't know how it all began, but from the time that I was old enough to have even the foggiest consciousness of sexual feelings, it was obvious I wasn't "normal." (There aren't quotation marks big enough for the word "normal.") I have attempted to retrospectively self-analyze how and why I developed things the way I did, but I'm not concerned with trying to delineate that right now. All that matters is that I'm not heterosexual. I'm not gay either. Bisexual doesn't quite cover it either. And I have basically felt the same way since well before I had the vocabulary to describe it.
When it comes to sexual attraction to actual humans IRL of any gender, I have virtually none. I guess I would call myself asexual in that regard. I have almost no interest in having sex with anyone for real.
Romantic feelings are totally different. I do experience romantic attraction IRL. That's where I feel the most "straight." There's a big part of me that would love to be in a romantic relationship with a girl, like dating and doing life together. I love the idea of platonic romance, with little to no sexuality involved. But most people out there aren't looking for that kind of relationship it seems, and society definitely isn't set up in a way that makes platonic romantic relationships very feasible, especially for people who wish to make that kind of relationship their "soul mate" or life partner or whatever, like marriage without the rings and sex and having kids. But enough about that. That's my non-furry side.

Now for the furry part. Again, I wish I knew how this happened, but as soon as I was old enough to start having sexual feelings, it soon became clear that they weren't gearing towards actual people, whether it was pictures on the internet or IRL, regardless of gender. When I started sneaking onto the family computer to look up stuff that "excited" me, somehow the first thing I went for was farts. And not really videos of actual people farting, no. And this was before I was even old enough to have an orgasm or even aware of such a thing as masturbation. I just remember the thrill of searching up something that seemed "naughty" without my parents knowing about it. At first, it was just videos of fart scenes in movies and cartoons. I especially liked the more exaggerated and unrealistic ones. It wasn't too long before I discovered furry fart art. From there, everything just gradually coalesced. I am totally ADHD and I've always had a very active imagination. I loved cartoons. I loved video games. I gradually came to realize I had a particular enthusiasm for anthropomorphic animal characters from media, and somehow that enthusiasm slowly took on an element of sexual attraction. Considering that if you're reading this, you're probably a furry too, I am sure you relate to this experience. Over time, I realized my feelings of excitement, what made my heart race, what became increasingly clear was arousal as I got deeper into puberty, was especially drawn to fantasy, cartoon, exaggerated, unrealistic depictions -- hyper stuff. It was like the less the art style resembled real life, the more I liked it. It was like my mind was building a gulf between fantasy and reality. Cartoon instead of realistic. Furry instead of human. Hyper muscles, butts, bellies, even inflation, instead of realistic body sizes and shapes. And somehow stuff like gas (and more recently, soiling, even diapers, and sometimes vore) got mixed in too. Oh well. Just chalk it up to a hyper imagination (pun intended) that became charged by testosterone. The furry fandom is the ideal place for me to let my now-adult imagination run wild, hahahahaha~

But this is not an approach to sexuality that goes over well in the church. In the worldview of evangelicals like my family, mixing imagination with sexuality does not lead to anything good. I was 13 when I first got caught looking at stuff. And I'm sure it is true that I was looking at stuff that I should not have been at the age of 13. From then on, my parents made sure that all family members' devices had monitoring/accountability software on them. And perhaps that was the best thing at the time, when their son was still a minor. But I never lost the interests or leanings that seemed to have come out of nowhere to begin with.

By the time I was 18, I had a much clearer understanding of what the furry fandom was, the way that I was interested in it, and what sites and platforms that furry artists used. My first attempt at creating a Furaffinity account was in January 2020 (I turned 19 in April 2020). This lasted for about two weeks and then I actually decided I felt icky about it and all the hiding it from my parents that I was trying to do. I deleted that FA account and had some really deep conversations with my parents. Those were probably the best conversations I have ever had with my parents about my feelings and about the furry fandom in general. It was around that same time that I became much more interested in the SFW side of the furry fandom as well. Amazingly, my parents were okay with me being a furry as long as I stayed away from anything NSFW. With their knowledge, I created a fursona (not the bulldog I have now) and started interacting on Telegram with the official furry student organization of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was a freshman at the time. This ended up being a great outlet that helped me get through the Covid-19 lockdown which began just a few weeks later. But in the back of my mind, there was always that part of me that still wanted to mess around with sexy furry art and whatnot.

As pandemic restrictions gradually lifted in 2021 and IRL began to open back up, I slowly lost interest in the UIUC furry group that I'd been hanging out with on Telegram. Once the IlliniFurs started having in-person gatherings again, I went to a few of them but ended up deciding I didn't really dig the vibe of interacting with furries IRL. Then my interest in the NSFW side of the furry fandom began to rear its head again, after receding into the background for some reason when I was active in the SFW side of things with the IlliniFurs. From 2021 to 2024, I just figured out ways of lurking and poking around, mostly on Furaffinity and furry twitter, with my parents' minimal awareness. Somehow this became harder as time went on, as they seemed to grow more suspicious, and in their eyes they were just trying to help me "overcome my porn temptations."

Then in September 2024, I entered graduate school. For the first time ever, I was living far away from my parents. I grew up in Champaign-Urbana and went to UIUC, so my family was just across town for the latter two years of my undergraduate, and I had lived at home my freshman and sophomore years (sophomore year being 2020-2021, so covid yeah).

But now I was a grad student, more independent than ever. And I went from Illinois to the University of OREGON. My family was now 1800 miles and two time zones away. Ostensibly this shouldn't have changed what I could do on my phone or PC without my parents' knowledge, because the same "accountability software" was on my devices since 2015. But then I discovered that somehow, that software had inadvertently been uninstalled from my phone. Not something that any of us had done deliberately. But now I could access FurAffinity and Twitter and stuff -- which in addition to my parents receiving activity reports from that software, places like FA and twitter and etcetera were actually entirely blocked. And then somehow I discovered that they weren't anymore. I could get on FA and my parents seemed to be none the wiser. It was a few months before I worked up the balls to go from being a lurker to actually making myself known in some way. But in January 2025, I did something that I had long daydreamed about doing -- I snagged a commission from Megacoolbear, who has been just about my favorite artist for years. And thus Nate da Bulldawg was born.

The response I got to this dawg (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/59781813/) and his booty-blasting tendencies (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/59786808/) WAY exceeded my expectations. Suddenly I felt almost felt like a "POPUFUR" (stupid term, eh) for a little bit! Some artists like GigaBonz and JoeMike that I have been a big fan of for a long time actually reached out to me and wanted to chat! Wow. Just wow. That is a pretty amazing feeling.

But I let myself go a bit too much. It was the winter term of 2025, the second of three academic terms of the first year of my Master's degree, and I was diving deep into the rabbit hole of the online furry fandom. I spent way too much time online, to the point that I was actually neglecting school. I stopped being careful. It wasn't sustainable. And I came to feel like I was totally free to do whatever I wanted online and that my parents weren't paying attention anymore, even though the previously mentioned accountability software was still on my PC.

But my parents are more keen than I was giving them credit for. Even from afar, they could tell something was up, and then something that betrayed the way that I was now actively engaging with some people in the online fandom with no SFW/NSFW boundaries got through to them via that accountability software. Of course, this brought everything to a head. I went home to Illinois in March for spring break and they confronted me. It was unbearably awkward. It was emotional. It made me feel so fucked up, I briefly felt like killing myself. (Don't worry, it was a very transient feeling. I have never seriously considered ending my life.) In that moment, I was willing to cooperate with them. Maybe I was a little bit emotionally manipulated. But I wanted to save face and maintain the best relationship possible with my parents. So I dropped off of all the stuff I had been doing as a furry online. That was when I wrote this journal: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11099997/

Going into the spring term, I cooperated with my parents and agreed to install a much more comprehensive device monitoring software on my phone and PC, called Qustodio. It's a software meant for kids. But in my parents' eyes, they were staging an intervention for an addiction I was letting myself sink into. Which considering my patterns and how much time I was spending online in the Winter 2025 academic term, there honestly was a kernel of truth to that. I performed significantly better in the Spring 2025 term with my online furry life eliminated. All the apps and websites I had been using were now blocked, and I became much more productive.

In early July, I discovered that I could still access Discord, and so I recreated my Bulldawg Discord account and managed to get back in touch with a few of the furry friends I had said goodbye to in March. But after about a month, my parents caught on and on August 11, confronted me yet again. It was even more uncomfortable than in March, because now they knew I was actively trying to circumvent what they were trying to do to "help" me. After this, I resolved that if I ever wanted to have anything to do with the furry fandom, I was going to have to get a separate device and NEVER let my family find out about it. I have to be very careful. This brings us up to the past two weeks. See my next journal for the conclusion. https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11231137/