Lessons from 25+ years in varying degrees of furry community involvement:

• When it comes to fictional stuff (art/stories), if you don’t like it, don’t look. Leave people alone if they are not harming real people or animals. It’s not actually the end of the world if you see something that you weren’t ready for, or something that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Either avoid visiting sites with content that bothers you, or block users/tags if the site allows it. This is very easy on most sites now. If you visit some artist or site to shock yourself on purpose, you only have yourself to blame.
• If you’re a young artist/writer/musician, your best chance of finding a creative community is with your peers, rather than established artists, who already have their own peer group.
• If randos online tell you being a furry is cringe, wait until they realize how cringe obsessively hating furries is. On that note, virtually everyone who has a weird thing about furries used to be one, and might come back around once they grow out of that phase. As someone who in fact went through this cycle, I can tell you it is extremely embarrassing.
• Try to be cool to people, in general. Furry is a very small world.