Do you remember when and what helped you discover your affinity for furries? If you do, I'd like to hear your stories!
To get the ball rolling I'll start with mine. While I certainly can't pinpoint the exact date I became fixated on anthros, I can absolutely remember getting Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast when I was 7 or 8 (2000ish).
Seeing Tails was all I needed to get hooked, and want to be a cool fox like him. I didn't even have a word for it until I started using the internet years later, but my furry fate was sealed from then onward. It was the catalyst that got me into fantasizing about having fur and a big tail, and got me doodling lots of Sonic art as a kid. While I've long since stopped making Sonic art, Tails still holds a special place in my heart over 20 years later.
I've always felt more comfortable around animals than people, so of course I would be drawn to animal and animal-like characters in media. (And there are a lot of them when you're a kid!) It didn't become anything of note until my teen years, however.
One day I was flipping channels on the TV when I came across a documentary about foxes. It was meant for children, but the information was new to me and I found myself watching to the end. A day or two later I was watching something on Cartoon Network when the main character suddenly held up a fox as a prop for a joke. The next day I noticed a random picture of a fox somewhere, and then it was like foxes were suddenly everywhere.
And yet, despite foxes being such a common animal with great importance in folklore and popular culture, I realized that I knew almost nothing about them. This felt like a problem that I needed to solve. I read everything I could about the creatures, both in my father's old encyclopedias and later on the internet when I got access to it, and the more I learned the more I started to identify with them. As a socially-awkward teenage nerd I really resonated with the idea of these small, solitary creatures struggling to get by on intelligence alone, without all the easy advantages given to their larger canine relatives. Now I began to imagine myself as a fox, and would often spend the last moments before sleep imagining the adventures of this other me. This idea of an "inner me that is a fox" would become a useful tool for exploring my identity.
While I consider this the start of my furriness, it would be many years before I actually joined the furry fandom. There was a lot of misinformation on the early internet that kept me away, and I won't repeat it here but I'm sure many of you know what I'm talking about. Then one day a friend of mine shamelessly held a brony birthday party and I decided that if he could embrace his weird interests so openly then I could at least admit mine to myself. I started lurking on r/furry, realized they were actually cool people, and was shocked to learn that the weird little fox people in my head are something other people have and that they're called "fursonas".