Afterword

A few final notes

Hello again, old friends. It’s been a while!

Before I accidentally inspire any hope that I am reviving Almostwild, I have to immediately disappoint you: No, I’m not writing again here. But I did want to share an update. It’s been about a year and a half since I last wrote about nudism and the nudist community, but in that stretch I have spent a great deal of time thinking over what all my years inside the nudist community meant to me, how my nudist practice strengthened some parts of me but also how it eroded other parts of me. I’ve thought about why I was so drawn to nudism, what the roots of my growing misalignment were, and why I stuck around for so long despite sensing that misalignment.

This week, I published a piece for Planet Nude called “Original Sin,” which identifies what I believe to be the central values gap within the American nudist movement—the distance between the movement’s purported goals and its actual practice. I took a look at the history of the movement itself, its guiding philosophy, and did my best to place it within its own historical and social context, not to expose something evil buried within but to, from my perspective, demystify this movement’s origins and de facto principles. It pulls from philosophical concepts of Leib and Körper, two competing ways to present and understand the body, and the concepts of freedom from and freedom to, negative and positive framings of freedom respectively.

In a way, I think this piece is the culmination and logical endpoint of every crack in the nudist movement that I’ve written about over the past several years. It explains the lingering racism and homophobia, leftovers from a Depression-era escapism that sought refuge from uncomfortable social change and political controversy. It explains the deep yet conflicted disdain for sex and sexuality, which poises nudists against sexual expressions of nudity while actively benefiting from—and at times exploiting—society’s association of sex with nudity. It explains the movement’s insistence on an exposure-first approach to freedom, placing bodies on the front lines of its cultural battle with insufficient regard to the lives that inhabit those bodies. It explains why the nudist movement so often frames itself as freedom from clothing, from sex, from politics, from government, from censorship, but struggles to identify what freedoms it aims to create, to expand, to build.

It was cathartic for me to research and write the piece for Planet Nude. It made sense of the discomfort I had been feeling for a very long time within the community, but I would be lying if I said that it did not also make me sad to write. Sad because I was mourning a practice that was once meaningful to me, sad because I was confronting how much of myself I had given to something that was causing me harm in ways that I did not see at the time, sad to realize that some of these tensions had begun to affect parts of my life beyond the community. But also sad because this community, despite its flaws, is still very meaningful to a great many people and I don’t find any joy in discrediting or diminishing that importance for others. That was not the goal. Above all else, what most of us are seeking is community, in whatever form we can get it.

What I discovered about myself, both by writing “Original Sin” and by taking the time to reflect on my story, is that I have carried shame about my body and sexuality for a very long time, including during my time within the nudist community. My evangelical Christian upbringing instilled in me a fear and a guilt about nakedness, but mostly about sexual feelings related to the body. Discovering nudism as a teenager gave me a healthy outlet to better understand the body, but it also channeled any sexual curiosity I had underground, allowing it to exist only under two conditions: either under the guise of the wholesome exploration of nudism, which my mind accepted as good, or as a secret, guilt-ridden practice that could only be experienced privately and shamefully, which my mind perceived as bad. Nudism gave me cover to set aside my sexual hang-ups and avoid confronting them or fixing them. I wanted so much to belong in this community that I was willing to make myself smaller to fit. I was cutting off part of my humanity to appease others and earn approval, to make myself the right kind of free.

I don’t think that’s everyone’s story within nudism, but it was mine. My experience with nudism came with great moments as well, where I did feel embraced and supported by others, where I made great friends, where I had a wonderful time connecting with nature and with others. None of that goes away just because I needed to step away.

Since leaving nudism, I have found it difficult to enjoy my own body, however. Nudity has been uncomfortable as I try to renegotiate my relationship to it. Where nudity was once an expression of community belonging for me—like a black leather jacket to a biker—I have not fully been able to separate the practice from the movement I no longer align with, to enjoy personally. It now carries baggage that I need to work through. Writing “Original Sin” has helped give me a kind of acceptance and closure I needed and, I hope, the ability to move on and appreciate nudity without nudism—as something that I do for me personally, on my time, at my pace, and not for others. It has also given me the courage to start actively confronting my shame and guilt around sexual nudity, something I need to work toward to make myself feel whole again—or finally.

I’ve really missed writing, too, it turns out. Since I stopped writing Almostwild, I’ve been wondering what exactly I had any authority to write about, what I could contribute that wasn’t already being said. I think perhaps this journey toward freer attitudes about nudity and sexuality, toward greater honesty and self-acceptance, and toward maybe a little wilder, less inhibited view of the world might be worth writing about. Onward, upward, wilderward.

So while Almostwild has run its course, I hope some of you might join me for what comes next. Thank you all again for coming along on this ride!

“Study of a Nude Man,” Gustave Courbet, ca. 1840s