Speaking personally: I'm not a furry. I've always appreciated the (generally agreed upon) artistic talent of the furry community, and growing up as a kid who loved Sonic the Hedgehog, I made friends with a lot of furries who understood I was coming at it from a very different angle. Eventually I fell out of the Sonic fandom, but that's not relevant.

I mention this because this is a deeply touching novella that I imagine is extremely relatable for furries struggling with anxiety or depression, but it resonated with me, too— more than anything I've read in the past year. The seeking out of an amplified, ideal self, and trying to figure out through the fog of depression who that self even looks like, and having a breakdown when you realize you can't just *perform* that perfected self with any success: all of these things strike incredibly true for me, someone who identifies as non-binary and feels extremely nebulous about what path to take to a real reflection. 

I've seen some people say, in my own path to reading Symbiotic Fursuit, that they were left feeling bummed, but my experience wasn't like that at all. There's no denying: it's surprisingly heavy material, getting into the headspace of someone who legitimately cannot *afford* the assets required to even experiment with being their ideal self. In this story it's a fursuit, but in others it could be access to medication, or to art supplies, or any other number of things. The use of the titular suit-creature as a conscious (and conscientious) sounding board for this particular self exploration is what makes it so special, and so much less a lonely journey than it would've been had the story been about anything else. 

Briefly this novella did make me wonder: maybe there is something for me here, having thought I wasn't a furry at all, and suddenly being challenged in that notion by the narrator's breakthroughs in the story, which in turn reignited the as-of-late smoldering ember that was my hope for self discovery. Maybe I should ask more questions of myself, instead of doing nothing but working and subsequently distracting myself from work day-in, day-out. Maybe it would be a fantastic idea to walk down less familiar paths and see where they might lead. 

Read this story, if you've got time—it's relatively short, so you probably have time, and as thought-provoking revelations go, it's terribly affordable. And when you're done reading it, go for a stroll. Get some fresh air.