Just wanted to share this video produced by Furry for Life. Well said!

​Dear Papabear,

Good day! I'm writing this letter to let out all my worries and anxieties to you:
 
(2015) When I was 13, I revealed to my parents that I am a furry, they were okay. But they are totally weirded out about the fursuit part, and they told my brother ( who is 17 now ). I'm not very close to my brother but it leaked to him and I was really uncomfortable. Having a sibling sure does suck.

(2015) There was once I bought upholstery foam to make a fursuit secretly in my bedroom, I always hide the head in my drawer and when my parents were away I would usually work on it. But then after a month or two my dad found out and told my mother about it. This is when I decided to throw out my head because I felt like I lost all my dignity from my parents. 

(2016) Since this year, I haven't been talking about furries with my families lately, so I was still quite secretive about it..(I don’t know why) I made hand paws and a small tail for my furry needs, and also kept it somewhere that nobody would care to see. But wow, my brother found out and told my mother about it, and they are now chatting amongst themselves about how weird I am. I am really stressed and worried that my parents and my brother would think of me differently and negatively, what should I do, Papabear?

Lots of love,
Anonymous (age 14)
 
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Dear Young Cub,
 
One of the great difficulties of the human condition is that we are all biologically programmed to desire love and acceptance from our families, friends, and colleagues. We want this, especially, from our families because it is they who have nurtured us and who, ideally, offer us protection from the hazards of life. Therefore, when we feel rejected by them, we become frightened and insecure.
 
As you might imagine, Papabear’s inbox is full of emails from furries who are terrified of this sort of rejection. The main reasons why this comes about are: 1) parents want their kids to conform to society; 2) parents want their kids to be successful, and they define success as dependent upon money; or 3) parents want their kids to fulfill the dreams that they themselves failed to accomplish in their own lives.
 
I think you might agree that all three of these reasons are not very good ones. A gifted parent realizes that success is not defined by money but, rather, by happiness, and happiness comes from surrounding oneself with those who accept you for who you are and also from being allowed to be yourself and pursue those things in life that truly interest you, regardless of what society thinks. I, personally, reject the measuring stick society has created; if it were so great, the world would not be in the mess it’s in right now. A big reason furries make me smile is that we are iconoclasts (people who break the mold and follow their own paths).
 
You can see for yourself what happens when family members don’t support you for you: the result is you become secretive, distrustful, rejected, and unhappy. A wall is thus built between you and your parents and siblings, and this is never a good thing.
 
The first thing you must do, therefore, is rise above the idea that your mom and brother are right and that you are somehow a “bad person” who is indulging in something that is wrong and bad. Quite the opposite is true: your mother and brother are the ones being negative people who are hurting you. Do not be ashamed of yourself. The only bad people are those who deliberately hurt others. If you are doing no harm, do what you will.
 
If you are not ashamed, this alone will help your situation because when people feel ashamed about what they are doing, those around them pick that up, and they assume you are feeling ashamed because you know you are doing something immoral or sinful (when in actuality it is because you feel rejected). But! If you are unashamed and happy about being a furry, they might actually see it as a positive thing for you.
 
It is, admittedly, very difficult to overcome other people’s prejudices. Too often, parents and siblings buy into the negative hype about furries and immediately assume all furries are sick in the head. The lazy parent then forbids everything wholesale, and, as mentioned above, drives a wedge between parent and child that is harmful to the relationship.
 
All of this will be explained in my upcoming The Furry Book, which will be a guide to both furries and the families who love them (or misunderstand them).
 
Cubby, Papabear can’t force your family to change their minds, and you can try to change them (check out the “Coming Out Furry” category on my website for more advice), but don’t be surprised if you fail. In the end, what is important is that you understand that learning who you are and what is important in life to achieve happiness is more important than anything else in the world, and that includes the approval of parents and brothers and sisters. If they can’t accept you, that is their problem and reflects badly on them, not you. I’m not saying this to mean you should be angry with them; rather, turn a sympathetic eye toward them and understand they are trapped in a mindset in which they are paralyzed by the fear that society will reject them (or you). Once you realize, though, that society is the thing that is broken and that fearing the opinion of a delusional and ignorant judge is irrational, you will have set your spirit free.
 
This is all a lot, I understand, for a 14 year old to understand. It’s pretty mature stuff, really, and philosophical, I suppose. So, take some time to try and digest what Papabear has written here and write me again sometime.
 
Hugs,
Papabear

For the longest time, culminating in these bizarre 2016 elections, I have operated under the assumption that what has mattered in the world on an international scale is the conflict between the rich and powerful vs. the poor and disenfranchised. I’ve even explored the whole New World Order/Illuminati/secret societies thing, the conspiracies about how “they” want to return to a world of rich royalty and serfs a la the Medieval Age. Such has been the history of mankind, a cycle of empire building, rebellions, empires falling again, new empires rising, over and over again. All orchestrated by the NWO?
 
Let’s assume there is a secret group of ultra-powerful plotters out there orchestrating wars, elections, and so on. Perhaps the goal isn’t actually to create a wealthy elite who hoard money and material goods. Powerful dynasties and rich families have, as noted above, risen and fallen in the past, and even if they did so again, the ultimate end would be a new rebellion and return to another equilibrium. Pointless.
 
What if the goal is actually to keep this cycle going? Keep a struggle between rich and poor, powerful and powerless going, up and down, back and forth, forever? The point? As long as humanity is preoccupied with material resources, armies, borders, wealth, power, etc., we are never going to evolve spiritually into new, enlightened beings.
 
A good example of how this works is religion. The best religions might actually start with good intentions, but they become corrupted once the true power elite discover what is going on, so that the new religion can become part of the cycle. Thus, Jesus becomes a prophet of truth, but when a sect known as the Gnostics teaches that one can have a direct connection to God and Jesus without a priestly elite, that sect is quickly destroyed to be replaced by an approved religion, Catholicism, with a hierarchy, power, and wealth. The Protestants break away from the Catholics, setting up more fighting, which is even better in the minds of those truly in control. Or, a prophet called Muhammad comes up with some nice ideas about God, only to have his followers fight over who his successor will be, creating Sunnis and Shiites who will be forever fighting each other and forgetting what the prophet originally meant. Or the Jews, the Chosen People, become obsessed with the idea that they need a political state and that real estate is all that really matters, thus setting up an endless war in the Middle East.
 
And while everyone is grabbing at real estate, or oil, or water, or money, or control over political systems, shadows lurk in the darkness and laugh at us, knowing we will not become a threat because we will remain animals instead of a new, spiritual species.

Without an NWO or some other power, then the pattern still remains, only we just have ourselves to blame for our lack of progress.

I, for one, refuse to play this game. I am going to focus on what really matters: my spirit and my love for others.

​Greetings, Papabear!
 
I hope you are doing well. I've been meaning to write you for a while, if nothing else but to check up on you. You have been in my thoughts and prayers and I haven't forgotten how kind you have always been to me in my letters. This next one has some positive vibes for a change! My parents have started to relent and are even going to anthrocon 2016 with me and three other friends whom I've swayed. The rest of this email is a little serious however, but there's no problem this time I promise.

I love the fandom, but could it get in the way of a potential career in the future? This coming fall I will be attending Iowa State University to pursue a degree in education. I am a bit antsy about college but definitely am ready for something new. With my future plans, there come some necessary questions. Since educators are one of the most trusted disciplines in the world aside from nursing, teachers are expected to possess that air of professionalism and have the record to prove it. Teachers are role models of the school district and the communities they work and live in. With all the scrutiny that will come from both my peers and the people around me, if the question somehow arises of me being one of those "furry people", could this be potentially problematic for me? I think this is a question that takes some consideration, given my chosen line of work. I believe myself perfectly capable of handling people with standard questioning of the fandom. You know, the kind we've all heard before. Heck if I were to mention being a furry right now at school, everybody would immediately send fifty text messages to everybody else and I'd get yiff thrust into my face with incredulous exclamations of "you're into this???" before I had even finished explaining what a furry was. To be clear, I don't plan to be openly furry. That business has no bearing in my work and doesn't belong there at all. If I have my way, nobody will even know. I don't intend to hide it, I just plan to be strictly business and being furry is part of my personal life that does not and should not influence my job. The potential problem I see however, is faculty or a parent googling me and raising some drama with what they find. We can assume anything they find is clean. There is no explicit content in my name or of my character and there never will be any that is of my knowledge. Because of this I do not fear serious repercussions, trying to terminate me on claims of my simple interests-especially one that is harmless and kept professional-causing loss of public trust could be borderline discriminatory and the school likely wouldn't use that against me. But all it takes is some gossiping for my name to get purposefully dragged through the dirt. Part of it could be people thinking they are more buddy buddy with me than they actually are. Part of it could be being rude for the sake of being rude because they don't get it. What do you think? Will I just have to watch myself, or should I consider looking at other options?

Thank you again for being yourself. If there is ever anything I can do for you, please hit me up and I would jump at the chance to give back and pay your kindness forward.

Your friend,

Zanda

* * *
 
Hi, Zanda,
 
I’m glad that things are improving with your parents—good news! Thanks for sharing.
 
Okay, on to teaching…. Teaching is one of the noblest professions, and I think it’s wonderful that you wish to help others learn. I’m going to have to say some things that you might not like, however. It’s really not so much about being a furry as it is the state of our current educational system.
 
I have known several teachers in my life. All but one of them got so frustrated with the job that they quit or retired early. One was even a teacher-turned-principal. He was fired from a Catholic school when they found out he was gay (private school, so they can do that). Another teacher was white in an all-Hispanic school. In an interesting case of reverse discrimination, the administrator there made his life so absolutely miserable that he retired early for the sake of his sanity. A third teacher quit because he got so tired of parents running to the principal because he had given Little Johnny or Mary a bad grade, and then the teacher backing up the parent instead of him. He was a young teacher and quit the profession in two years. American teachers live in a system where the students are passed from grade to grade even though they fail the course, where they are forced to stick religiously to a teaching plan and actually berated by administrators if they, God forbid, teach something that is not explicitly allowed. The self-esteem of students takes precedence over actual learning. Learning methods are absurd to the point of being counterproductive (especially true in current math-teaching methods). Add to this restricted or diminished budgets that are so bad many teachers (except in rich districts) end up buying their students’ supplies, and the fact that some teachers have even been attacked or poisoned (in one case I know of personally, even murdered) by their own students, and you can kind of see why some teachers freak out and are caught on camera letting loose on a student (not forgivable, but understandable).
 
I want you to be aware of some of these things before you decide to go into teaching, because from what I’ve learned from those in the field, it is a thankless profession, at least in public schools. This might be different in private schools. I don’t know, although the case of my friend who worked at a Catholic school shows that it’s not a good situation there, either. Now, if you want to teach at the university level, that can be a bit more calm; however, my sister is a successful professor here in California and it is very frustrating for her, too. More and more, professors are taking on administrative tasks to the point that she and her colleagues joke that “teaching is something we do in our spare time.” She loves to teach, but, sadly, has little opportunity to do so. Add to this the bureaucracy (she was once in charge of a committee that spent two years compiling a report only to have the university president decide, when it was done, “Naah, I decided not to do that”; two years completed wasted) and she has also told me she would love to retire early.
 
I would not be a teacher if you offered to pay me double what I make now. It would not be worth my sanity.
 
But that’s just me. If you don’t care about any of the above because you have a burning passion in your heart to teach, then go for it, and God bless.
 
Okay, so let’s say you’ve gotten your degree and you’re now a teacher at PS 39 in Brooklyn, working at a lovely historic building. Super duper. I would keep my personal furry life completely separate from my professional life, if I were you. Do not associate your real name and real life in any way with furry, and you might get by. When you are a teacher, or cub scout master, or baseball coach, or any such job where you work with kids you are subjected to a standard different from that of the ordinary working world. My friend Tycho Aussie works in an office surrounded by adults and they accept his furry work and even enjoy it, no worries. But when you’re associated with the fandom and are around little kids, you will be subjected to incredible ignorance, fear, and suspicion from administrators, colleagues, and parents living in a hypersensitive world in which everyone believes that a pedophile lurks around every drinking fountain and teachers’ lounge. They won’t care if you keep your nose clean, because it will be guilt by association. To use an over-the-top example, it would be like someone who is in the KKK saying, “Well, I never burned any crosses.” Doesn’t matter, you’re in the KKK, and as far as many are concerned the fandom is a haven for pedophiles, perverts, and pagans (oh, my!) True? Of course not, but you’ll have a bear of a time convincing people otherwise once word is out, and once you are outed you can never go back.
 
I’m sorry, this is not a very upbeat reply, but I want you to be prepared for the worst. If you are, anything better will be happy news. This is also not to say that things can’t change. I’m hopeful my book will help clear things up, and I also know that there are others doing similar work, both in book and movie versions. As well, the fandom is growing by leaps and bounds all around the world, and I think that, as it does so, it will seem less and less like a clandestine, deviant society and more like something that is mainstream and out in the open, like comic book fans (this is why I strongly agree with those who say we should not ever talk to the media). The articles I’ve been reading of late that are published by mainstream presses are much more understanding and honest than they were in the 1990s and 2000s. And movies like Zootopia help, too, actually. It might be that, by the time you finish college, things could be very different from what they are now.
 
I can’t tell you what you should do with your life, nor would I want to, but it’s best to go into something with your eyes wide open and cleared of all naïve and idealistic notions of what you think it’s all about. If you can do that and forge ahead anyway because you love the idea of teaching a new generation about the world, then I am your sincere fan.
 
Blessed Be,
Papabear

This is not something I normally do, but I found out about a website today that I think is just wonderful. It's called Rainbow Ark and is a site to help promote understanding between furry, religious, and LGBT people and to help those who are furries or LGBT to see that they can follow a faith and not be excluded. Rainbow Ark has a website, a Live Journal page, a Facebook page, and they are on FurAffinity. Also, they have a buddy organization called Open Arms that has this FA page.

Guess this is just one of those times when ol' Papabear is a little slow to discover something so cool. Check 'em out!
​

Hi, Papabear,

This is something of a follow-up to a letter I wrote to you some years ago, questioning my own attitude towards being single after the end of a bad relationship (http://www.askpapabear.com/letters/is-it-okay-to-be-single-and-happy-about-it).

About two years ago, the Universe decided to throw a Dragon at me. He's a local fur, sweet, intelligent, remarkably handsome, and we get on quite well together. We've been friends for over five years, dating steadily for two, and I can honestly say I've never been happier with anyone.

He exhibits none of the behaviors that made my prior relationship such a trial; he's open-minded, accepting of our differences, doesn't demand obedience or undivided attention at all times and generally isn't a judgemental twit. 

I did my utmost to conceal the very existence of Furry from my ex, with a remarkable degree of success. If he'd found out about it, his first reaction would have been to accuse me of inappropriate behavior with the dogs, and things would have escalated quite unpleasantly from there.

My ex hated video games, and on one occasion after watching me dismember stormtroopers with a Lightsaber in one of the Jedi Knight series, was on the verge of banishing them from the house (the game is rated T, with violence and other content approximating a PG-13 movie). My Dragon stomps my face into the dirt three times out of five in Hearthstone (online card game similar to Magic) and he and I have linked our Steam accounts in order to give each other access to our game libraries. 

Dragon is open to new things. My ex firmly believed that anything he did not enjoy, appreciate or understand (including, but not limited to: video games, anime, any music created after 1985, modern communications technology, mobile phones, modern medical research and space exploration) should be destroyed. Suffice it to say I greatly prefer my current circumstances.

We have not spoken of any sort of permanent arrangement yet, for a variety of reasons, and I don't foresee us doing so any time soon, but we enjoy one another's company greatly.

To those who feel unlovable and that you will never find anyone, I say this: Never say never. Things you need tend to find you when you are least expecting them - or didn't even know you needed them.

Stilghar

* * *

Hi, Stilghar!

Thanks for writing and updating us on your happy news!

Hugs,
Papabear
​