12/2018

The time has come for me to say goodbye to the furry fandom. I will do my best to keep this post short but as these things tend to go I know I will probably leave many questions unanswered. Throughout the past several years I’ve grown as a person and the man I am today is not the wayward boy I was over a decade ago. This has been very difficult to demonstrate and I’ve realized the best way to do so is to make peace with matters and move on.

I joined this community at the end of 2007 as a misguided and sexually confused outcast. At the age of 19 and fresh out of remediation counseling I was the textbook definition of the perfect mark. I needed a place where I felt like I belonged and was waylaid by strangers welcoming me with open arms eager to tell me my weird feelings toward dinosaurs were completely normal. I made some very poor choices regarding the company I kept, the things I believed, and the situations I allowed myself to get caught up in. My actions from these first few years aren’t who I am nor are they what I wish to be remembered for. I screwed up, plain and simple; I was taken advantage of and I wasn’t even aware of what had happened until many years had passed.

Despite this, I will always cherish the genuine moments I had with people from this fandom. Many of you brought me up during periods where I felt I was at the end of everything. I hold no grudges, but I do have regrets. I am thankful that in 2011 those who truly cared about my well being stepped up to intervene. With the help of close friends and therapists I came to realize the hole I was digging myself into; I understand now that a community so heavily sexualized was the last possible place I should have been when I was at my most impressionable and vulnerable. In the years that followed (2012-2017) I remained loosely in the fandom and made an effort to present myself as a better person and role model, but in the end I feel this departure is the best decision.

I look back at my early time and work with immense shame and the anxiety associated with these feelings continue to haunt me to this day. I did not understand the gravity of things like the labels I carelessly identified with and the search terms/tags I used to describe my early works. Writing those first few stories was a mistake. Involving myself with Herpy was a mistake.* Listening to the opinions of people who were okay with these things and allowing them to encourage me further was a mistake. Unhooking myself from this initial mindset took years of work and remains an ongoing process. Over the course of the past decade I’ve been diagnosed with (and am receiving treatment for) a number of emotional and psychological disorders… such as a form of paranoia caused by what I’ve experienced so if this letter reads like the writings of a crazy person I apologize. But I bring this up not in an effort to handwave matters away but to help illustrate a better frame of reference for the extent of how dire a situation I’ve worked through and how easy it was for me to stumble into that pit in the first place.

I became entrenched in a bad community and got in way over my head. The feedback loop of misplaced encouragement hooked me hard and gestures such as being invited out to conventions due to my perceived popularity only served to bury me deeper and prevent me from seeing the bad track I was on. I was groomed and I allowed myself to be strung along because I was too afraid to talk about my situation to an outside party out of fears of ostracization and even the involvement of law enforcement. (As absurd as it sounds I was scared that writing erotic stories about humans and dinosaurs was somehow illegal.) I didn’t have the courage to stand up for myself and say “no”, there were (and to this day still are) people in the fandom whom I was terrified of angering and I allowed these fears to influence my choices; I would placate those who intimidated me because I was afraid of what they might do otherwise. I wanted to fit in and I stupidly fell for the platitudes I was being fed using the reasoning “these people are my friends”. Obviously, they weren’t. On the outside I gave off the appearance of maybe a “C-list” person at best but on the inside was nothing but absolute turmoil and a desperate search for a way out.

“I’m sorry” doesn’t even begin to tackle the tip of the iceberg regarding how I feel, but it’s a good place to start. I truly am sorry; I may have been a bad influence for Lord knows how many people because others were a bad influence on me. I was a useful idiot at best and a patsy at worst. To be completely sincere I was just some embarrassing teenage weirdo who really liked dinosaurs; the validation, however misplaced and inappropriate, was intoxicating. All of the stories and sketches were just a fantasy for me and it became an issue when the company I kept gradually turned rotten and I realized it was starting to rub off on me. At the end of 2011 I began the process of breaking away and in the time that has passed I’ve formed healthier relationships based upon interests that aren’t completely centered around sex. The difference this has made in my life is like night and day; I am a better person because of it and I just wish that when I was 19 I had the support network I have today.

Our journeys deviate here. It has taken many false starts and years of encouragement to reach this point but I am finally ready to reclaim my life. Before I lost sight of myself I was an entertainer. I performed on stage. I sang. I danced. I am ready to take these things back as what truly define me. This mess that I got sucked into, the mess responsible for the letter you are reading right now, isn’t me. It never was. “Dracokon” is the biggest screw-up I’ve made in my 30+ years of life and everything that name represents to me is dead. The remnants of this era are a mark I will wear for the rest of my life and the emotional trauma that it has caused me is immeasurable. I have no desire to participate in furry fandom matters anymore and I do not wish to be roped back into them. I am beyond done with this awful period of my life. I’ve severed ties unanimously and deleted everything. I want to be left alone. My only request is that you respect this decision.

Please allow me to have the life I very nearly lost.

Thank you.

.

(*This is a massive understatement but if I were to itemize out my feelings regarding Herpy this letter would be twenty pages long. Just know that I’ve long since understood it was a huge mistake to accept the admin role and I realize taking over five years (2011-2016) to divest myself of it doesn’t shine a positive light in my direction. I remained there out of the aforementioned fear and obligation; I had no exit strategy until the site finally died. I see no value in trying to defend what reputation Herpy may have once had or to “correct the record” because it is indefensible to me. What people think of Herpy doesn’t matter to me anymore because chances are I actually agree with you now. Nothing good came from anyone’s involvement with Herpy and I wish I never registered there because it would’ve prevented almost everything that haunts me today from happening.)