sarah zedig! 🍉🐐

read about women camera operators in the silent film era here

actually, i don't think i have written much about it! the short version of how i Came Out as a furry is that i was on stream sometime in 2019 and deervvitch asked in chat if they could draw my fursona, i said i didn't have one, so they asked if they could design one and if so what animal i wanted to be.

now, i'd fooled around with the idea of having a sona for a long time. i was very much a furry closet case-- i was obsessed with werewolves to the point of religiosity in high school, i had a furaffinity account as far back as 2009, i'd always been indescribably compelled by funny cartoon animal people. i was a loud defender of furries back when they were still relatively niche online and a lot of people's first reaction was ridicule or fear-mongering (even wrote a paper about it in undergrad lmao). yet i never called myself a furry! it's honestly pretty funny looking back, just how similar being closeted trans and closeted furry were for me. such a vocal ally and yet obviously i could never be a transfem furry, like obviously not hahaha, i'm just normal and sad forever the end. it's like the werewolf stuff fucked me up so bad i couldn't even let myself humor imagining a bodily-different version of myself, whether genderswapped or covered in animal fur. i swear it's like i had a radar for anything that might possibly make me happy, and i was determined to avoid every single ping

(i also rejected making a fursona throughout my 20s because it seemed interminably boring and lazy to be Yet Another Wolf, which probably wasn't a great attitude to have about my own self-conception either)

anyway i stayed in the furry closet for a couple years even after coming out of the gender closet. then the aforementioned stream happened, and when asked what animal i wanted i was like... well i think coywolves are cool, but that's still basically just a wolf... oh haha you know there was that picture of shirtless adam driver going around where he had foisted a goat up over his shoulders,

and i'd joked on twitter about being That Goat, so, haha, what if i was a goat? you don't see goat furries every day. that sounds silly and harmless in a way that couldn't possibly change my life forever lol lmao

then deervvitch hit me with this:

and it turned out to be gender! yknow, in a sense the most "clout-chasey" motivation behind me doing art online was this extreme hope i had that someday someone would be nice enough to draw me as a cartoon subject. like consistently the most fulfilling thing i could imagine for a looooong time was someone drawing me as a furry. so to have it finally happen was definitely euphoria and to this day when someone draws my goat i just get so giddy and joyful. it's me! there i am! honestly one of the best parts of having a fursona is the privilege of seeing it rendered in different ways by different artists. in fact it just occurred to me that the most substantially specific career goal i ever had in my 20s beyond like, "write books/make movies" or whatever, was to make enough money that i could afford to commission furry artists.

it's funny looking back at all this now, when goatsona was such a flippant suggestion on my part and now it's become a cornerstone of my identity. it just seeped into me over time. goats are a bizarre animal, simultaneously spooky and goofy as fuck. the more i joked about being "literally just a goat" the truer it felt, i guess because as an elaborate metaphor it helped me crack open some very-repressed creature tendencies and actually feel more naturally comfortable around people IRL? i feel so comfortable with my gf zoe now that i baa around her often. it's like i've added a whole new range of expressions to my vocabulary, and as a result i've gotten better at communicating how i feel to the people who really know me. it's weird, but i'm really glad for it!! i feel like so much more of a person now that i think of myself as less of a person, you know?