Overall, my time as a furry has been full of fun and joy. I always make a point of telling people how the furry fandom is full of the most caring, friendly and accepting people I have ever met. I have found this particularly true among the dancer furs, who make a point of supporting and cheering on their fellow community members and treating them like family.

However, as much as I love to post and talk exclusively on positive things, my fandom experience is not without its rough times, either.

I grew up as the younger of two identical twins and was raised to be exactly the same as my counterpart; hence, I grew up with the mentality that I had to constantly compare myself to others, and I essentially did not know how to express myself as an individual or find my own unique personality, feeling that I could only be defined relative to those around me. That was when I was lucky enough to be acknowledged at all; often, treating the two of us as one unit, others would only acknowledge my sister, or refuse to call me by my name, instead referring to me simply as "twin," a nameless object with no significance. Since I turned 18 and went off to college on my own, this has improved somewhat, but I haven't been fully able to shake what my brain has been strictly taught to do for all but the last 3-4 years of my life. Even when I tried my best to stand out on my own, I'd usually just get brushed off and ignored.

You could say, without exaggeration, that I was raised as the runt of the litter.

I guess this isn't a common experience, as I haven't met anyone else who can relate to it, but that's the reality of my childhood. Unfortunately, due to the perhaps ironic uniqueness of my upbringing, barely anyone I've met seems to consider even for a moment that I'm still trying to grow as a person and learn what it means to be individual, and as a result, being compared to others is a highly sensitive topic for me. The typical assumption seems to be that since I'm a twin, I must be really close to my family and love to be around them all the time, and I do admit this was true for a lot of my childhood, but since I struck off on my own, I have found that I really need the time and space to reflect and grow independently without my family in the picture.

The understandable expectation that identical twins need to be exactly the same has led to my very rocky experience as a dancer fur. I love fursuit dancing, and wouldn't give it up for anything; though, this is part of what has made the experience hard. I started teaching myself to dance and entering fursuit dance competitions at local conventions in 2015, soon after I enrolled in college. Everything was smooth sailing for a while. I thought I had found the perfect hobby in which I could express myself freely without worry of judgment by anyone else. On the whole, this is still very true for the majority of dancer furs, and probably any one of them you ask can attest to this. I had to work really hard -- sometimes three times as hard as anyone else, I felt -- but it was, like that with the rest of the fandom, largely a positive experience.

I thought I was doing a great job.

Until the spring of 2017, when my twin sister placed first in a very well-attended fursuit dance competition. All of a sudden, I couldn't talk to anyone, over the Internet or in person. When I tried to strike up conversations, even among fellow dancers, I was blatantly ignored time and again. On the rare occasions I did manage to get through to somebody, they could find nothing to talk about but how awesome and praise-worthy my sister was. Nobody ever wanted to know what I was up to, or what I thought about things. All they ever talked about was my sister. They may as well not have been talking to me at all. It was like they only started caring once a dancer started winning. I can understand that they wanted to celebrate laudable achievements, but not why that meant they had to ignore or even condescend someone who had not achieved such things. I seriously considered deleting my social media accounts, changing my fursona, and returning incognito just so that people would drop the topic. (You can read my sort of old journal on this topic for context if you would like.)

I have not forgotten the hurtful and degrading words that have been spoken to me in many instances since then, and even after my first time winning a dance event. I think one of the hardest parts about these comments is that most people either would not find them particularly upsetting, or, perhaps worse, would not begin to consider that they might be upsetting to someone in a situation such as mine.

The past 365 days have been spectacular for me in terms of dancing. The majority of my performances have been ones I have visualized and planned for a number of years in advance. In December of last year, I won my first dance event at a small meetup. Then, I spent a semester abroad in Australia, finishing with classes just in time to attend Furry Down Under (FurDU), at which I also won one of the dance events. I placed 1st in dance events at four consecutive events after that, until I finally broke my streak at Anthro Northwest last month, ending with a total of 6 wins in a row at various conventions. (By the way, I have compiled videos of all of my dance performances ever into one journal, so feel free to check it and watch them.)

You'd think this would instill in me a lot of confidence, but impostor syndrome is a jerk, I still can't fully shake the habits my mind pounded into place for the first 18 years of my life, and all of the (intentionally or not) unkind words that had been spoken to me in the last year or two continued to eat at my insides. Hence, one night, when my housemates and I planned to have a hangout around the fire, I decided to -- metaphorically, at least -- erase them forever.

I wrote on five slips of paper not all of the hurtful comments I have received, but the ones I recalled the best, stuck them in the fireplace, lit them with a match, and watched them burn.

No matter what happens, I don't think I will ever escape my role as the family runt, but at the very least, I can leave the toughest times behind me, and look forward to the future, where I'm sure many more wonderful fursuit and dancing experiences await me.