This came up in therapy today.

I have all the skills to be a far more social person. I’m eloquent, sensitive, charismatic, persuasive, witty, and pretty gosh darn cute.

And my therapist thinks that those skills represent the real me. The person I am deep inside, as opposed to this overextended larval stage that depression had made me.

And I am inclined to agree. The facts are all there if you care to look. As Fruvous, I am bubbly, cute, wacky, charming, and all the rest. And Fruvous, being an alter ego I made in order to express things I couldn’t express as myself, is therefore the real me.

I have known for a while that I was striving to be more like my online fursona. And now I know while. Fruvous is not, as I thought before, a remote ideal to strive towards.

He is me. I am him. Fuzz and tail aside, we are the same person. He is the real me escaping the fell clutches of my depression and flying free through fantasy.

And there’s no reason I can’t be like that in the real world. After all, I am the person controlling the fursona. I am the one who comes up with all the funny fuzzy things he says and does. That is all me.

So why not be my own Fruvous? So to speak? Be that crazy and outrageous person who isn’t afraid to turn the charm and personability up to 11 and going up to an attractive stranger and beaming all those vibes directly at them.

He’s (I’m) not worried about people thinking he is being obnoxious. I am sure some do. And sometimes he (me) gets shot down in flames by people who are seriously not down with the whole fluffy silly cute thing, and it hurts, but he (I…or is it me… ) doesn’t take it personally because clearly, that was not someone we were going to get along with anyway, so it’s not big loss.

Funny how rejection can really kill your attraction to someone.

Lately. I have been fantasizing about what it would be like to hit a gay bar like The Pumpjack in full Fruvous mode. Sit down next to total strangers and turn on the charm. Strike up conversations with whoever appeals to me. Be flamboyant and outrageous and show off what an amazing dude I am.

Ask people weird, random questions to see how they respond. The people I would be looking for would be the people who can either :

1. Respond intelligently – good
2. Respond in a weird and funny way – EXCELLENT
3. Look at me and say “That’s a weird fucking question. Who are you again?” – not as good as 2 but still definitely my kind of person

And sure, people might think I am the most annoying fucking person ever, but to be honest, that’s the risk I have been taking my whole life.

The only difference is that now I know it, and I can take the risk consciously. I have a big, big personality and not everyone can handle it, and some people are never ever going to like it.

But if it does in the real world like it has in furry text chat land, those people will largely ignore me and the majority will at least consider me a harmless floofball and an awful lot of them will like me a lot.

And I don’t need everyone to love me. I just want enough people to like me so that there’s always someone fun to hang out with around. Someone I can cuddle up with and chat with and enjoy.

Basically, as Fruvous, I am a total extrovert. I have a large number of friends of varying degrees of closeness, from “just enough to say hi” all the way too “with benefits and a great deal of affection”.

And I need that big group because I need a lot of attention and social stimulation and an audience for my antics. Without that, I get sullen and depressed.

If that’s not extroversion, I dunno what is.

So I am back to an idea I entertained before but rejected : that I am not really an introvert, I’m a depressed extrovert.

I am still not sure. Sure, I can now see that without the depression, I would be a far more social person. So I can definitely say I would be more extroverted.

But I think I will always be the sort of person who finds social interaction draining and who needs quiet and calmness in order to recharge his batteries instead of drawing his energy from the stimulation he gets from his environment.

So I can easily see myself in a situation where I am the life of the party for like, an hour, and then have to go home and be alone for the rest of the night.

Like a story where the main character is an alien or werewolf or something like that, and normally can’t be around people, but has something that lets them seem like a normal human being for a short period of time.

Only without all the tedious “oh no, time is running out, will he be caught?” bullshit.

I am way better at intelligent time management than that.

Makes me wish I could use liquor to stay calm. But that has never, ever worked for me. Alcohol has never increased my control over my emotions.

It can make me very relaxed and mellow and groovy, but well, if you think I can be obnoxious without being drunk, you ain’t see nothing yet.

Anyhow, my point, and I do have one, is that I already am the person I have been trying to learn to be.

There just happens to be a chemical illness making it hard to express who I really am.

And that kind of thing can be fixed.

Look out, world, here I come!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.